


Meet Death Sitting

by bomberqueen17



Series: Meet Death Sitting [1]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Body Horror, Civilian Casualties, Competence Porn, Delirium, Found Family, Gen, High fever, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Overuse of italics, Sharing a Bed, adorable children, confused narrator, geralt in a bathtub, it's not super dark i promise but like brace yrself if that's a thing, jaskier is middle-aged and tired, mention of assisted suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-02-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:20:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 46,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22572403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: “No,” Jaskier sighed. “This is the thing, Geralt. I’m middle-aged and tired and I just think I’d rather meet death sitting down and facing it rather than from behind while I’m running. You know?” He contemplated that a moment, and finally added, “Especially if it’s you.”Set after the end of season 1.UPDATE: The Fat Baby song in chapter 7 now existshereas composed and recorded by @fannishliss and is BRILLIANT.SeeSeries Noteson this series for a list of all the fics and what chronological order they go in, as well as recommended reading order if you're into that, just so you know what you're getting into here.
Relationships: Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon & Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon & Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Series: Meet Death Sitting [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639717
Comments: 623
Kudos: 2051
Collections: Best of Fanfiction, Finished Fics I Love





	1. Survival

**Author's Note:**

> I'm well aware this is just going to get jossed but the next season isn't coming out for aaaaages so come, join me as I thrash around and come to terms with my unexpected feelings about Jaskier of all characters.  
> Mostly TV canon but I uh have read a lot of fanfic about the books and games so at least I'm trying? Only when it's funny, though.

One would think that wartime would be a good opportunity for a bard. So much material, and so many people hungry for meaning, and who better to combine them than a man with a gift for poetic imagery? 

But Jaskier was no bright-eyed youth anymore, and hard experience had taught him that wars were as terrible for bards as they were for anyone else. No, the good time to be a bard was after the war was over, as the dust was settling-- you figured out who’d come out on top, and made nice songs for them, and they rewarded you for it, and then you also could use all that material and meaning-analysis-giving to make beautiful songs so people would cry and feel better and give you money. That was all well and good and could be a great boon to any bard’s career.

But first you had to survive the war, which involved several things Jaskier was good at but did not really let on about: common sense and keeping one’s mouth the fuck  _ shut _ . One kept one’s head down and kept moving, or holed up somewhere, until it was  _ over_. The absolute stupidest and worst thing to do was to make inspirational songs prematurely, and wind up lionizing the wrong side. (No; keep those stowed away, close to the heart, until a few years had passed, when perhaps there might be a resurgence of sentiment-- they could be useful, then. But before that, they were death.)

Somehow, despite all odds and appearances, Jaskier had wound up being a pretty decent survivor. And that was what he was doing now: surviving. At the moment, surviving looked like singing sweet pretty folk songs to a group of frightened children holed up in a barn while even more frightened local officials decided what to do about the devastated countryside and the hordes of terrified, utterly bereft refugees, of whom the children and assorted others shut up in this barn were a large contingent.

As a youth, fresh out of music school, convinced of his own importance, Jaskier had scoffed at children’s songs. The very idea! But as he aged, he was finding that there was something to them. The fact that he knew the song about all the animal noises was a very real and concrete social good, at this moment, and the grateful looks the local innkeeper kept shooting him every time she came and poked her head into the barn and saw the relative peace (if not quiet) reigning there definitely meant he was getting fed, later, and maybe even not getting killed, later, and that was all to the good. 

He’d volunteered for this, because the local alderman had rather heartlessly demanded that each group of refugees send only one representative, preferably the most responsible adult, to petition him, which left the children and elderly and injured and otherwise incompetent crammed into this barn where most of them had been screaming and crying. The innkeeper, who was a very recent widow and not bearing up particularly well under it, had been alternating frantic worry with catatonia. And Jaskier had decided that this was a kind of keeping his head down that was likely to work out for the best.

It had the side benefit of keeping him out of the various kerfuffles and arguments and emergencies that kept going on. Those also were bad for bards. There was a lot of power in song, to be sure, but there was also a shitload of power in social upheaval and song was kind of… well, not a sure bet, in a case like that. He didn’t have much of a reputation yet among these people, but given his luck it was only a matter of time before someone with a grudge brought it out. That seemed to be happening, rather a bit; in desperate times, some people’s best natures shone through, but the vast majority of them got extremely petty and opportunistic and-- well,  _horrible_ , really. The local alderman had soldiers on loan from whatever the local nobleman was, and there had been some violence and Jaskier was really studiously avoiding knowing about any of it, but some of his current altruism was inspired by the knowledge that there was kind of a culture of frontier justice going on at the moment where anyone who spooked the powers that tenuously, ah, were  _ being _ , at the moment, got summarily and messily killed, so he was determined to do absolutely no spooking of anyone at all, and to present himself as a harmless benevolent sort of nothing really who deserved to eat and not get decapitated by a sword, thank you sir, of course sir, right away sir.

He was just at the part where the sheep said baa, which he had learned by now to do a pretty hilariously correct impersonation of, when there was a kerfuffle at the entry door of the barn, and he had to decide-- acknowledge it, and perhaps panic the children and, well, actually there were a lot of adults in this room but none of them were in much of a state to not panic, or make an even louder noise to cover it?

He opted for the latter, and let out a truly piercing sheep-bleat impression that caused uproarious laughter and gave him a moment to look over at the door. 

They’d shoved in a new girl, white-blond, older-- early teens, maybe-- and she was clearly protesting being lumped in with the children, and he thought it likely she was unaccompanied. The alderman wasn’t letting unaccompanied children speak for themselves; if one of the competent adults he’d allowed in didn’t speak for them, then they were just, well, Jaskier didn’t know yet but he wasn’t particularly hopeful about the outcome.

If she was a latecomer like this with no one to speak for her, and needed help, she just wasn’t going to get any.

The laughter had died down, and he paused and asked one of the closest children, “Was that really a proper sheep noise or do you think it was a goat?”

That started a great deal more uproar among the attentive participants, which was an opportunity for Jaskier to judiciously stoke the chaos while giving his fingers a rest from the lute strings and cast a worried eye over the newcomer, who clearly was neither unfamiliar with nor entirely committed to the let’s-not-upset-anyone-with-a-sword ethos that was currently prevailing. 

He judged his timing for as the discussion was dying down a bit and the innkeeper had shoved the door shut and locked the girl inside. She turned and looked around for help, and he waved his hand.

“You!” he said. “You, new girl-- come and settle this, what noises do goats make?”

“I  _ beg _ your pardon,” she said, and oh her accent was posh, good heavens she’d absolutely grown up in some fine house somewhere, though she was dressed unexceptionally now. 

He beckoned her over. “Come, sit,” he said. “You look like an authority on many matters. We’re all in this barn together, trying to be good and patient enough that matters don’t get any more out of hand outside, and I’m told that if we’re all very well-behaved and nobody makes any trouble there’ll be something to eat rather soonish. So come and help me pass the time.”

“I came to beg for help because my companion is injured,” she said bleakly, but came and sat next to him. “If they can’t help me, I need them to let me go to find help somewhere else. I can’t leave him.”

Jaskier nodded. “There’s not much help going spare around these parts,” he said. And then, because he was an idiot and all of his much-vaunted-to-himself skill at surviving was really self-delusion, he said, “but if you keep quiet, I’ll help you if I can. We just have to wait for them to finish whatever it is they’re doing in there.”

“I don’t really have time,” she said, anxious.

Jaskier shook his head. “None of us does,” he said, and jerked his chin very slightly toward the pallets of the wounded. “Some of us are actually dying. But, do you know any songs? You sound like you’d know some fine songs.”

“I don’t--”

He strummed the opening chord of one of the mannered, courtly love ballads that had been all the rage the previous season. No, it wasn’t one of his, but it was a good one anyway, and the girl looked resigned as he cocked an eyebrow at her and did the fancy little intro fingerpicking bit. “I do know that one,” she admitted.

She’d been taught part-singing, she was absolutely a noble’s daughter or at least had been raised in a court, maybe as a high-ranking servant or something. With only a little prompting and support from him, they did the piece as a duet, the fashionable way, and the whole barn fell silent to listen to them in delight. The girl had a passable soprano, a little sharp and a little inexact but clearly somewhat schooled in it. With practice she’d probably have some real power, be a decent performer, but of course a noble lady wouldn’t ever be a performer, this sort of thing was designed for parlor entertainments. Even a lady-in-waiting wouldn’t perform publicly, only for her lady’s entertainment, so she’d never be taught to use the full power of that voice.

But it worked; involving her calmed her down and got her to be on his side as they worked to keep the helpless wretches locked in the barn calm and safe, and sure enough in an hour or so the innkeeper came in with a kettle and handed out bowls of thin flavorless soup with hunks of not very good bread, but it was food. 

And she gave Jaskier a flagon of wine, surreptitiously enough, and an extra hunk of terrible bread, and he wasn’t going to turn that down. It really was better than a sword to the chest, and perspective was currently his most important gift.

Jaskier jerked his head and led the new girl a little ways away, so they could talk while they ate. “Tell me your problem,” he said. “I don’t really have any more power than anyone else but at least I can listen to you, and we’ll start there. I assume your family was killed in Cintra?”

She looked blank for a moment. “How did you,” she said.

“Everyone here’s family was killed either in Cintra or somewhere along the way,” he said. “And you sound Cintran. Listen, don’t tell me who you are, if you’re someone important, because I don’t want to know.”

“My name is Fiona,” she said, “and I’m not anybody important,” and he could tell she was lying but at least she knew that she ought to be. It was something.

But,  _ shit _ , she was someone important. He really didn’t need to be in the middle of a ballad right now.

“Good,” he said. “I’m Jaskier and I’m not important either. Now, you said your friend was injured. The healer here is very overextended and isn’t likely to have much medicine left to help anyone else.”

“I don’t know if medicine can help him,” she said. “I think-- he’s  _ magically _ injured, we need a mage.”

“We haven’t got one,” Jaskier said grimly. “All the mages around here got rounded up to go to the defense of-- wherever that was, and I think everybody’s dead or fled or worse.” If he was going to write a ballad about it someday, first he’d have to find out who had actually won, and then he’d have to ask someone who’d been farther away to tell him what had happened, because from here it had just all been chaos and rumors and he still had no fucking clue what had actually gone on.

“Oh,” she said, deflating. 

“Is he a knight?” Jaskier asked. “Or a-- someone young, like you?”

“He’s,” she said, and clearly had not thought of how to explain herself. Someone  _ also  _ important, probably, Jaskier thought wearily, which was why they hadn’t already joined up with any refugees. “A knight,” she said, seizing on it; it was clearly a lie. 

“Great,” Jaskier said. He felt for her, really he did, but her story as explained thusfar was really no more pathetic than any of the others here-- orphans, cripples, all with horrible tales of devastation, most entirely innocent, unrelated to any sort of political power. “Fiona” was young enough to be innocent but surely had acquired those fine manners at the knee of somebody who’d had some power and had probably done horrible things; he didn’t have to know anything about local politics to know that. So helping her could go one of two ways-- she was just the sort who in about, oh, five to ten years could rise up and lead a wonderful rebellion full of nostalgia for the old ways and harking back to the glory days of whatever dynasty she was from ( _ fuck _ , she was probably related to Calanthe, and of all possible outcomes of the invasion Jaskier had been considering that terrifying creature’s horrible death one of the better likely side effects), and it’d be the sort of thing a bard would be useful for after the fact, but the far more likely outcome was that to avoid that first one, whoever was currently winning would be looking extra-hard for her to destroy her and anyone who’d helped her along the way whether those helpers knew what she was or not, just to prevent the inevitable uprising and the lovely songs and all. 

So the sensible thing to do was to throw this girl onto the tender mercies of the paranoid local alderman and let her get herself killed by making a fuss because she didn’t understand how to truly camouflage what she was, and make one’s escape to write a sad ballad about her later if it was ever safe.

But Jaskier was well aware that being sensible had never been his strong suit. “So you have a knight who is injured or perhaps cursed,” he said. 

“Ehm,” she said, hesitating, “yes.”

“Which is it?” he asked.

She hesitated again, then said reluctantly, “Both.”

“He’s both injured and cursed,” Jaskier said. “And a knight.”

“Yes,” she said, which made him even more sure the man, whatever he was, was absolutely  _ not _ a knight. 

“Fantastic,” he said. 

“You’re not going to help me,” she said. 

He shook his head. “I don’t know what help is possible,” he said, “but I’m the most likely sucker in this village. Listen,” and he leaned in a little and lowered his voice, “the alderman has been killing people who make a fuss, just because he’s afraid and doesn’t know what else to do, and I’m terrified out of my mind that one of these times he’s just going to start killing people and not stop, so I’m going to be honest here and tell you that my first priority is keeping you from frightening him enough that he starts killing.”

“That’s awful,” Fiona said. 

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Jaskier said, feeling harried, “but  _ literally everything _ that has happened in the last  _ month and a half  _ has been  _ genuinely awful _ and I hardly think me exercising a little pragmatism even  _ rates _ , on that scale.”

“Oh,” she said, “I meant, the killing is awful, not-- you.”

He mentally went over the conversation they’d just had, decided she might be genuine about that, and said, “Oh. Well. Right. It is.”

“So you’re telling me I need to keep my mouth shut and try to quietly slip away back out of town once they unlock this barn,” she said. 

“That’s what  _ I’m _ hoping to do,” Jaskier said, “because it has become obvious to me that the local resources are somewhat strained and there’s not much help in the offing. But while I’m stuck here I’m just trying to do all the good that I can, because that’s within what tiny power I have. Now, your needs are somewhat more complex, and I doubt I can do a damned thing for you, but at least if you stay calm and quiet you won’t get any of the rest of us killed. But I think I’ve the softest heart left of anyone in this town, so yes, if they let us go without killing us I’ll try to help you.” He instantly regretted saying it, but she gave him a look of such keen and measured intelligence that he felt bound by it. 

Well, with all the corpses lying about the countryside, it absolutely was not safe to travel alone, and possibly not at all, so at least there was a pretense of a mutually-beneficial nebulous safety in slight numbers, here.

Mostly, though, Jaskier was uncomfortably aware that he was a sucker.

The afternoon wore on, but before evening fell, the barn doors opened, and Jaskier controlled his flinch of terror and got up and calmly led the children out into the town square and the alderman had them sorted into groups and divided up to receive what accommodations he could scrounge up for them, and there was nothing for Fiona but Jaskier graciously stepped in and said he’d take her with him farther down the road to see if there was more help going spare there, and the alderman was grateful enough for that and for his help with calming the refugees that he gave him a pathetic but welcome little sack of provisions and a flustered blessing.

Jaskier shouldered the pack and his lute, retrieved his horse who at least had been fed, and tried not to think about any hard questions of whether the alderman was a decent man overextended, or just a monster trying his best, or what, and off they went down the road to leave behind what was hopefully not going to devolve into a massacre after a few more days of tension. 

“We managed to get to a ruined farmhouse before I couldn’t get him up again,” Fiona said, and Jaskier noticed she was trying to sound matter-of-fact, and would have succeeded at the impression if she weren’t pressed against his back so that he could feel that she was trembling. “But I-- well, he wasn’t making a lot of sense, and he’s. Much bigger than I am. So I thought it over and decided to go for help, and I hope he’s where I left him.”

“When you said he was under a curse,” Jaskier said, “and I realize this is a very belated question to ask, but-- what sort of curse?”

“He’s not, er, violent or anything, errr, mostly,” she said, with a nervous half-laugh.

“But the house is this way,” Jaskier said. He was belatedly realizing that the truth could really be anything; this girl could be a lure for bandits. Well… there wasn’t anywhere safe, and if he died trying to do the right thing it was at least better than dying doing something ignoble. 

“Actually the  _ horse _ is this way,” she said. “I, er, I took his horse with me to go faster, since we’ve just the one, but I thought showing up on a horse wouldn’t convince anyone I really needed help, so I’ve stashed her just over behind this house.”

  
Jaskier stared at the horse, who was a good-quality, well-built, brown mare with a white stripe on her face. Fiona had been right; this was a knight’s horse, not the horse of a desperate refugee. But more than that, she looked… familiar. No, he was surely imagining it. He was past the point of thinking about that stupid witcher all the time and half-expecting to see him around every corner. “That’s, ah,” he said.

“She’s a decent bit of horseflesh,” Fiona said. “But she’s not very friendly, I wouldn’t put my hands anywhere near her face.”

Jaskier stared at her. The horse regarded him from one vaguely malevolent dark brown eye. It was true that a great many horses looked approximately like this one, but the malevolence was more familiar than it ought to have been. “Fuck,” he said quietly to himself. A knight who wasn’t a knight. Who was somehow magically injured. Who happened to own this particular horse.

“Afraid of horses?” she asked, settling the saddle onto the animal’s back with more facility than someone her size should be able to muster. 

“Nope,” Jaskier said. “Tell me, is this animal’s name Roach, by chance?”

The horse cocked an ear at him. Fiona turned and stared at him. “How would you know that?” she demanded.

“Fuck,” Jaskier said to the sky. “He’s not a knight and now I know why you were hesitating.”

Fiona set her jaw bravely. “He’s a  _ person _ ,” she said. 

Fuck. “I am  _ well aware _ ,” Jaskier said. “He just happens to be a person who has treated me, who is also a person I might mention,  _ exceptionally _ badly, and I am truly, genuinely, deeply disinterested in letting fucking Geralt of Rivia personally fuck me over yet again.”

The girl stared at him. She had unnervingly wide-set blue eyes and Jaskier thought that any bandits trying to use her for a lure had probably been shredded already. She might be the threat, actually. 

Well, shit, maybe she was the one who’d cursed Geralt in the first place. 

“Well,” Fiona said. “Will you help me or not?” She raised her chin, a stubborn glint lightening her uncanny eyes. 

“Why do you know him?” Jaskier asked. Was she some sort of monster he’d been trying to tame? He did mad things like that, sometimes. 

She set her jaw. “Why do  _ you _ know him?” she demanded.

“I told you,” Jaskier said. “He fucking-- listen, we were traveling companions for  _ years _ , and he just-- threw me out like I was so much trash, because a woman was mean to him and he had no one else to take it out on!  _ Fuck _ .”

She glared suspiciously. “You know,” she said, “I’m only inclined to believe you because you use that word so much.”

“It does seem to be the majority of Geralt’s vocabulary,” Jaskier said. “I  _ never _ said it before I started going about with him.”

“He gets cross with me if I say it,” she said. “It’s not fair.”

Jaskier let his breath out in a sigh, shoulders slumping. “You  _ do _ know him,” he said. Geralt wouldn’t be scolding a monster, would he? Well, if he had been, it spoke of a mutual sort of relationship, not of him being bespelled somehow. But that reminded Jaskier, then, of his resolve, and he straightened up and said, “Then you can tell him Jaskier told him to go fuck himself, and he can’t possibly be cross with you about relaying a message accurately.”

“He’s dying,” Fiona said. 

Jaskier considered that. “Good,” he said. “He’s died plenty of times, he should be fine.”

Fiona stared at him, considerably disconcerted, but he still couldn’t tell if it had been a play for his sympathy. “Really?” she said finally. 

“Yes,” Jaskier said. “I traveled with him for literal years, and saw all sorts of horrifying fatal accidents befall him, and he was fine every time, and only ever grouchy with  _ me _ for being concerned.”

She contemplated that. “Maybe he’ll be all right, then,” she said. “Only-- well, it’s. He’s delirious, most of the time, and doesn’t know who I am, and keeps talking to me like I’m someone else, and then-- I think he thought I was his mother, at one point.” She grimaced. “So I could relay your message, but I don’t think he’d understand it.”

“Oh,” Jaskier said. “That, uh. That doesn’t. Sound very good.”

“No,” she said, and leaned toward him almost pleadingly. 

Roach took advantage, then, of their moment of distraction, and tried to bite Jaskier, who evaded her with reflexes born of long practice. “Oh,” Fiona said. “You really do know each other.”

“We do,” Jaskier said sourly.

He got onto his horse to be out of Roach’s reach, and resigned himself to his fate.


	2. Sensible Behavior

  
  


The house was only lightly ruined; it had been burned but the fire hadn’t caught, and a great deal of the structure was standing up just fine, including the whole bedroom area. There was food left, and Jaskier could recognize immediately that Geralt had been the one who had been cooking it, just from the way the place was organized and the smell of the leftovers. 

He waited politely for Fiona to come and open the only intact door, as if this were really her dwelling place. She lit a lamp, first-- a nice oil lamp-- and brought it with her. It was only just getting dark, but also, Jaskier remembered, Geralt usually could see in the dark.

As soon as she opened the door, carefully, there was a clattering noise, and she jumped back a little. “Geralt?” she called.

“All we need is for him to be lying in wait in here,” Jaskier muttered. 

“He wouldn’t hurt me,” she said, but she didn’t sound confident.

“I never did get an answer,” Jaskier said. “How do you know him?”

She pushed the door open and stepped in. “Legally, he’s my dad,” she said.

Jaskier somehow managed to choke on nothing, and fell to coughing. “He’s your _what_ ,” he said, but she’d walked through the door into the bedroom, and was now ignoring him.

“Geralt,” she said, putting the lamp down on a shelf with a nice reflector. This had been a nice house, Jaskier noticed uncomfortably, and tried not to think about what had happened to the people in it. “I tried to find a healer and couldn’t find one.”

Geralt was sitting up in the bed, braced against the wall, staring with his unnerving wolf eyes directly at Jaskier, and Jaskier flinched at the intensity of his expression. It was strange to see him again. But, gods, he was so _familiar_. 

Geralt didn’t react, either to him or to Fiona’s words, and Jaskier recovered himself and stepped through the door. It smelled terrible in here, some of the familiar odor of a leather-clad Witcher who’d spent a lot of time on a horse and none in a bath, but some of it the distinctive and terrible odor of gangrene. That was bad, that was _really_ bad. 

And still Geralt didn’t react to anything. He didn’t blink, he didn’t move, he didn’t even seem to be breathing. He looked exactly the same as he always had, same hair if a bit dirty and sort of stuck to his face with sweat, roughly the same clothing in various shades of black, more or less the same uneven coating of monster blood or somesuch nonsense. He was deathly pale, but then he was almost always deathly pale. He had a very dirty bandage on one leg, and rather looked as though he’d been dragged through a hedge backward, but it was highly likely he actually had, and also that was not unusual.

He was breathing, Jaskier noticed finally, but not very deeply. It was just that his eyes were open, and seemed clear, and he was staring straight at Jaskier.

“This is awkward,” Jaskier said. “I’m really the best she could do. I’ll have you know, I only came because Roach tried to bite me, and it made me nostalgic for old times. Nobody’s treated me so thoroughly like shit in years and I just didn’t know what to do with myself like that.” 

They stood in total silence for a moment. “Is he... dead?” Fiona whispered finally, and she sounded frightened. 

“No,” Jaskier said. He gathered his courage and moved closer. Geralt might pretend to be catatonic, just to fuck with Jaskier, but it seemed more cruel than he would be to a child. He was an asshole, but he had limits.

Closer, Geralt smelled worse, more like death. But his breathing was more visible. And his pulse was visibly beating in his throat, fast and shallow, and _that_ was deeply wrong. His pulse was always bizarrely slow, that was how you knew it was really him. 

Really him. Cursing, Jaskier fumbled in his belt pouch. One of the first things Geralt had taught him-- ah, there. He pulled out a silver coin and, grimacing, flipped it delicately so it landed on Geralt’s bare forearm.

It sat there a moment, noticeably not burning, and then slid off, and Jaskier carefully retrieved it. “Well,” he said, “all right.”

“What was that for?” Fiona asked.

“If he’s-- not Geralt,” Jaskier said. “Silver. You can tell if someone’s not, er. Not human.” Shit, he shouldn’t have told her. 

“What else would he be?” she asked.

Jaskier glanced sidelong at her. “Do me a favor and hold this between your bare fingers?”

“Why?” she asked suspiciously. Then her expression went wide and frightened. “You mean-- if he’s something that looks exactly like Geralt, but isn’t.”

“You’ve seen one, then,” Jaskier said. 

“I have,” she said. She pulled her glove off, reached out, and grabbed the silver coin, then held it out to him on her palm. “One took my face, once.”

“Ah,” Jaskier said, taking the coin back. “So, it could still remember you, and be out there?”

“It certainly could,” she said. “I escaped it but I didn’t defeat it.”

“So I should do a silver test on you every time I meet you,” Jaskier said.

“Maybe,” she said. 

Abruptly Geralt sucked in a breath so hard his head thunked against the wall, and he gave them both a wild-eyed look, reeling slightly as he sat. “Eskel,” he said, “I told you not to--”

His voice was so hoarse as to be nearly incomprehensible. Jaskier narrowed his eyes, thinking: he had heard the name Eskel before. “I think you’ve got me mistaken for someone,” he said.

“You’ll get in trouble,” Geralt said vaguely, looking at Jaskier with a weirdly soft and confused expression. Fear-- he was afraid. Jaskier had seen Geralt afraid before, but not-- not like this. “Eskel, you’ll get in trouble. You have to leave me here.”

“That’s a new one,” Fiona said quietly. “He hasn’t called me that one before.”

“I know who Eskel is,” Jaskier said grimly.

“You’ve met him?” Fiona asked, interested. Jaskier gave her a look. 

“Yes,” he said. “He’s another Witcher.”

Fiona turned and regarded Geralt with some interest. “That’s where he said he was taking me,” she said. “To a place where Witchers go.”

“Hm,” Jaskier said. “Ah, so, I can pretty easily spot the injured bit, but where does the curse kick in?”

“Er,” Fiona said, and Geralt suddenly thrashed and howled and clawed his way back upright on the bed, and stared blankly at them again, eyes rolling back. “Er, that.” She grabbed the back of Jaskier’s jacket and pulled him away from the bed, just as Geralt lunged at him. 

If Geralt were in anything like his normal form, he’d’ve had Jaskier dead to rights, but instead Jaskier and Fiona scrambled backward and fell over in a heap next to the door, and Geralt collapsed on the bed with another hoarse sort of shrieking noise. “Ah,” Jaskier said. “Er, are we sure that’s a curse? Only I think that’s actually just him.”

“Did you see his eyes?” she demanded, disentangling herself from Jaskier’s legs. 

“That’s sort of a thing he does sometimes,” Jaskier said. “He’s, ah. Well. I mean. He’s a Witcher, I think that’s a Witcher thing.”

“Does he normally lunge at you?” Fiona asked. 

Jaskier managed to get to his feet, brushing himself off. “I mean, sometimes,” he said. 

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Geralt said to the ceiling. He had his eyes closed but his voice sounded different, like maybe he was more lucid now.

“Do you know who I am?” Jaskier asked, and because he’d never had much self-preservation around Geralt, he went and stood within arm’s reach again. 

Geralt opened his eyes about halfway, looking exhausted, and blinked up at him. “Why wouldn’t I know who you are?” he asked, and he looked like himself, he looked lucid, eyebrows pinching together and mouth curved a little derisively, but almost fondly. 

“I don’t know,” Jaskier said, “but you haven’t used the right name yet.”

Geralt’s eyes sank closed, and he smiled, a slightly-bitter laugh making its way out of his mouth nearly silently. “Jaskier,” he said, “you always make such a fuss.”

“I haven’t seen you in years,” Jaskier said. “I’ve found plenty of other things to fuss over.”

Geralt opened his eyes and frowned up at him. “Years,” he said. “You were just here.”

“Where are we, then,” Jaskier asked. “Hm? What’s my newest song called?”

Geralt made a face. “You know I don’t pay attention to your songs,” he said. He visibly gathered himself to sit up, and then very obviously was surprised when he didn’t have the strength. “Hm,” he said. 

“You’re in rather a bad way,” Jaskier said. He found the pitcher of water on the bedside table, and poured Geralt a cup of it, then sat down on the bed next to him. It took a bit of doing, but he managed to haul Geralt upright, and the witcher settled himself against the wall with some help and took the cup of water, and clearly didn’t expect to have as much difficulty drinking it as he did. 

“You’re right,” he said quietly. “Something’s not right.”

“Fiona here says you’re both injured and cursed,” Jaskier said. 

Geralt frowned at him, and then looked over at where the girl was standing in the doorway. “Fiona,” he said, frowning, which just served to illustrate that it was clearly a fake name. Then he stared at the girl, blinked several times, and very obviously tried to re-orient himself. “ _Ciri_ ,” he said. 

“I gave him a fake name because I wasn’t sure he really knew you,” not-Fiona said, a bit flustered. “But you do know him?”

“This is Jaskier,” Geralt said. “He wrote the stupid _Toss A Coin_ song.”

“Really?” Not-Fiona perked up. “But that song is so old!”

“Oh come on,” Jaskier groaned. “Yes, I am a million years old.”

“You don’t look a million,” Not-Fiona said, then unhelpfully added, “only like, maybe, uhhh.” She clearly had no idea how to gauge adults’ ages. 

“Forty,” Jaskier said.

“Forty!” she agreed hastily. 

“That’s _not old_ ,” Jaskier clarified.

“I thought you were twenty-two,” Geralt said, but he did sound genuinely confused. 

“I was eighteen, when I wrote _Toss A Coin_ ,” Jaskier pointed out loftily. “But, yes, that was two decades ago.” He couldn’t bear it any longer, and slumped against the wall. “Geralt, you really don’t remember the last thing you said to me?”

Geralt blinked, and gave him a funny soft look, and then his mouth quirked. “I think the last thing I said to you was _I thought you were twenty-two_ , just now, but I admit I’m not tracking very well.”

“It was three years ago,” Jaskier said. “On the mountain. With the fucking dragon. And fucking Yennefer.”

“Yennefer,” not-Fiona said, far too keenly.

Geralt grimaced. “Fuck,” he said, and it had the decency to sound heartfelt, at least, “Jaskier--” 

“But _who_ is Yennefer,” not-Fiona interrupted, and Jaskier thought about punching her, but it really wouldn’t help anything. That was all he was going to get, wasn’t it?

Geralt shook his head. “I,” he said. He grimaced, and made a horrible sound Jaskier had never heard him make anything like, before, a bad noise, like a pain sort of noise. “Fuck. It’s a-- I’ve got a mornat in me and I can’t get it out. If we can’t find a mage, you’ll have to kill me before it takes over.”

Jaskier raised his hands, palms outward. “I don’t do killing,” he said, “and there aren’t any mages left alive around these parts, so we’re going to have to come up with something else.”

Geralt was still grimacing, and finally rolled his eyes to look over at Jaskier again. “The only other option is for you to cut it out of me,” he said. “Come on, it’s what I deserve from you anyway.”

“What,” Jaskier said, horrified.

“I lost all my gear at Cintra,” Geralt said. “How much silver do you have on you?”

“I have a silver knife,” not-Fiona said, producing it.

“That’s a start,” Geralt said. “But we need some kind of container that can hold the thing, once you manage to get it out.”

“Wait a moment,” Jaskier said, “I didn’t agree to this.”

“Well I’m not going to make the _child_ do it,” Geralt said. 

“I’m not really a child,” not-Fiona hedged.

“You’re _my_ child,” Geralt said. 

“Also nobody has really explained that to me,” Jaskier pointed out. “What exactly is going on, there?”

“Law of Surprise,” Geralt said. “She’s mine, and just as well. Now, go, and look in the kitchen, if there’s an iron pot with a lid it might do.”

Surprising even himself, Jaskier obeyed and went with not-Fiona to search the house for useful artifacts. That was it, that was what passed for meaningful conversation with Geralt of fucking Rivia, and here he was, like some kind of idiot lackey. They carried the assortment of finds into the bedroom, where Geralt had slowly dragged himself upright on the bed and was apparently fighting a slow-moving, losing battle with his own shirt. “What in the name of,” Jaskier said, and stopped dead as Geralt finally managed to get his shirt off.

His pale-white scar-seamed torso had something black pulsating along the ribs on one side, horrific and suppurating and visibly distending the skin, with trails of black leading away in all of the veins around it. Geralt lay limp on his side, panting with the effort of the little movement he’d managed. 

“It’s a mornat,” Geralt said, nearly whispering. His eyes looked like a wounded animal’s, distant and desperate. “It gets into a living body and takes it over, kills it, and then animates it after death until it can find a new host." He had to stop to catch his breath. "If I were human it would have taken over by now, but I’m almost out of potions to hold it back. You’ve got to cut it out of me, stab the silver knife through its spine, put it in the iron pot, tie the lid on, and bury it.”

“I,” Jaskier said, staring in horror at the-- the _thing_ , it was deforming Geralt’s torso, and Geralt looked fucking terrible, ribs standing out in a way Jaskier had never seen before. He _was_ dying. “Won’t that kill you?”

“I might survive,” Geralt said, characteristically unconcerned. “The easier option is that you put the silver knife through _my_ spine and then both of you run like hell.”

“I can’t do either of those things,” Jaskier said.

“Then find a mage,” Geralt said. “Those are our options. If you just leave me here like this it will take me over and then it will have my body to do whatever it wants, and it will probably follow you, so I don’t think that’s the option you’d want.”

“I _do not_ want your undead corpse hunting me,” Jaskier said fervently. 

“I knew you had _some_ sense,” Geralt said. He had to stop to catch his breath, winded just from speaking. The thing writhed slowly under his skin, and he gritted his teeth, obviously in horrible pain. 

“I didn’t know it was like that,” not-Fiona whispered, and Jaskier realized she was hiding behind him. “I thought it had just sort of poisoned him.”

“Mm,” Jaskier said, “that’s fucking horrible.” He turned his head. “Well, Fiona, it’s your knife, this is your chance to shine.”

“No,” she squeaked, and fled the room. 

“Her name is Cirilla,” Geralt said quietly, in the silence that followed. 

“Fuck,” Jaskier said, because he knew who the Princess Cirilla was.

“She’s got mage powers,” Geralt went on. “But no training, so she’s not really useful here. Still, she’s, ah. Powerful.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Jaskier said. “Fuck you, Geralt. Just-- _fuck you_. I can’t fucking believe-- I took the fucking hint, Geralt, and I _left_ , and I was _staying out of it_ , and here you are with yet more shit I can’t escape! What the _fuck_ , Geralt.”

Geralt was lying there with his eyes closed, and Jaskier just couldn’t keep up the energy a rant like that required. He sighed, and sat down on the bed, and reached over and took Geralt’s hand.

Geralt opened his eyes and looked up at him. “Then stabbing me ought to feel good,” he said, with a terrible little smile. “I really do deserve it. Listen, just put the knife through my spine and leave it there. There’s a map in my pack, I drew when this first happened-- if you go to Caer Morhen with the girl and my wolf medallion and hand her over to them, they’ll take her. You just have to promise never to reveal the location to anyone, and not to talk about it.”

“I’m not going to put a knife through your fucking spine,” Jaskier said. “And then _run errands_ for you. What do you think we are, here?”

“I thought you’d object more to the not talking about it part,” Geralt said. He was holding onto Jaskier’s hand, though his eyes had drifted shut again. He squeezed them shut harder, jaw flexing as he gritted his teeth, and Jaskier noted with reluctant fascination that the thing was moving again. 

“I haven’t got to that part yet,” Jaskier said. “I’m still-- dear lord that looks awful.”

“It is awful,” Geralt said. “And I’m almost to the end of what I can resist. Either you cut it out, kill me, or it kills me and sends my corpse after you, tonight.”

“How long have you been fighting it?” Jaskier asked. He really wished he could stop staring at it. 

“I don’t know,” Geralt said, “because I don’t know what day it is. But it came on top of me nearly dying of a ghoul bite last week or so, so I really have nothing left in reserve and I’m more or less completely out of potions.” He opened his eyes and looked up at Jaskier. “Which is why it’s so terribly convenient that someone who absolutely deserves to stab me has turned up. Destiny smiles upon me to the last.”

“I’m not fucking stabbing you,” Jaskier said. 

Geralt sighed. “Then help me brace my sword so I can do it myself. I’m still human enough that steel should do it.”

“No!” Jaskier said. Then, because he was an idiot, he said, “Don’t you have a silver sword?”

“Not anymore,” Geralt said. “I told you, I lost all my gear at Cintra.”

“Were you there when it fell?” Jaskier asked.

“Yes, but I lost my gear before that, because Calanthe--” He paused. “Where’s Ciri? I don’t want her to hear that part.”

Jaskier looked around. “Er, I-- don’t know where she went, actually.” He let go of Geralt’s hand and went out into the house’s half-roofed main room, where all their luggage was. “God damn it,” he said. He went out and walked around the house. Both horses were still there, open-eyed and still in the makeshift paddock, the saddlebags still hung neatly on the fenceposts. None of the gear was missing. 

He tried calling for her, quietly, but after a moment gave it up as a bad job. There were horrible things about in the woods all through here, and their witcher was out of commission.

“She _is_ your daughter,” Jaskier said, coming back inside with a shiver. “She’s got absolutely no concept of sensible behavior. I don’t know where she’s gone but the horses are there and she didn’t take anything.”

“Fuck,” Geralt said, and with great effort rolled onto his back, but he stayed there, clearly at the end of his endurance. The thing writhed again, and he gritted his teeth but wasn’t quite able to keep from making a horrible sound of pain. “I need her to assist you. If you just cut that thing out on your own you won’t be able to keep it from attacking you. I was hoping between the two of you, maybe you could manage it.”

“We’re running out of options, here,” Jaskier said. “And, fuck you very much, you weren’t going to tell me the thing would eat me next?”

Geralt made another horrible pained noise, and then another one, and Jaskier came over and sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand on the witcher’s forehead so that he didn’t have to look at him and the thing that seemed to maybe have heard their conversation and understood that now was the time to make its move, maybe, which was fucking horrifying but it wasn’t like Jaskier could outrun Geralt even as a reanimated corpse.

Geralt wrapped his arm around Jaskier’s leg and hung on, panting weakly, burying his face against Jaskier’s hip. Jaskier resigned himself and petted Geralt’s sweaty, filthy hair. “It’s all right,” he said quietly. “It’s-- it’s not, but it’s all right.”

“It’s really not,” Geralt managed eventually, his voice just a hoarse gasp. “It’s-- it’s really--” and he made another horrible noise. If he weren’t almost dead he’d’ve ripped Jaskier’s leg off from hanging on so tight but as it was, it was a manageable tight hug. 

Awkward, if the thing managed to take over and he started attacking like this, but well. There was no better time for despair than the present. 

“You’re an asshole,” Jaskier said. “And I hate you.”

Geralt hung on, trembling and panting, and Jaskier gently stroked the damp hair away from the cold sweat of his face. He could try to pry himself free and go hunt for the missing child, but he had a feeling Geralt was at the end of his rope and the thing would kill him any moment and then he’d be a reanimated corpse to deal with. It wasn’t like Jaskier wanted to witness that, but he also didn’t want to be wandering alone through these horrifying woods just waiting for the reanimated corpse of his witcher to come crashing out of the undergrowth to eat him. 

“You should run,” Geralt whispered hoarsely, after a long time.

“No,” Jaskier sighed. “This is the thing, Geralt. I’m middle-aged and tired and I just think I’d rather meet death sitting down and facing it rather than from behind while I’m running. You know?” He contemplated that a moment, and finally added, “Especially if it’s you.”

Geralt let out a breath, but there weren’t any words in it. It was clearly difficult for him to speak, and his breaths were coming slow and shallow against Jaskier’s hip. “Not too late,” he managed. “Knife through my spine. Doing me a favor.”

“No,” Jaskier said.

“Please,” Geralt said.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever heard you say that word before,” Jaskier said. “Not to me.”

Geralt breathed. “Last idea,” he said. “One more thing to try.”

Jaskier considered it. “If it was something I’d be willing to do you’d’ve suggested it already,” he said. 

“Find,” Geralt said, and stopped to breathe. “Its spine. While it’s in me like this.” He breathed. “Put the knife through it, through my skin.”

“What bloody good is that going to do,” Jaskier asked.

“Might give me a chance,” Geralt said. “At least it’ll slow it down.” He breathed. “My pack. One last potion in there. Maybe two.” With considerable difficulty, he unwound his arm from Jaskier’s leg. “Go. Please. Get it.”

“Now,” Jaskier said. “Now you get manners. After everything, _now_ you get manners.”

“Not much tutelage on those,” Geralt said, “in my upbringing.” His eyes rolled back as he spoke, and he was fighting to breathe. 

Jaskier got up and went to rummage Geralt’s pack. It had been ransacked and there was broken glass in it, and remnants of all sorts of things, but there were in fact three tiny bottles, wrapped in leather, still intact. He pulled them out, unwrapped them, and set them on the table. One was black, the second was a murky brown, and the third was a strangely off-putting green.

Geralt stared blankly at them for a moment. “Oh,” he said. “That’s better than I thought.”

“Good,” Jaskier said. 

“Help me up,” Geralt said, and Jaskier managed to help him prop himself back up against the wall. In the process, the thing under his skin started moving again, and he made some more awful noises, weaker and shriller than Jaskier had really imagined Geralt’s throat to be capable of. Jaskier held him up, waiting with no small terror for the man to either die or be able to speak again. 

Finally he was quiet, just breathing, head tilted back against the wall. “So which one is it to be?” Jaskier asked.

“The green one now,” Geralt said, “then we wait a moment to see what happens, and then the brown one and then you have to stab it right away.”

“And the black one?” Jaskier asked, not really wanting to think about stabbing. He glanced down at the hideous thing on Geralt’s side. As it gently undulated-- it no longer held still at all, and it was visibly larger than it had been-- _ugh_ \-- he realized that he could, in fact, make out the shape of its body, and the ridge of its spine. 

“If I live,” Geralt said, “long enough, we can discuss the black one.”

“Fair,” Jaskier said. Ciri’s silver knife was sitting on the table, and he frowned at it. “I really don’t want to do this, Geralt.”

“I need you,” Geralt said, “to find Ciri. I need you to take the map and find her and get her to safety. You have to survive this, and you have to find her.”

“I thought the point of this was that you’d survive it,” Jaskier said.

“The point of it is that the mornat doesn’t survive it,” Geralt said. “Regardless I’ll be in no condition to travel. You’ll have to go, and I can catch you up if I make it, and if I don’t, then so be it.”

“I don’t like those odds,” Jaskier said.

“They’re the best possible,” Geralt said, and then went quiet with a strangled little gasp as the thing moved. Jaskier realized with some horror that the way it was undulating, it was trying to burrow through his ribs. He closed his eyes, so as not to look, but it really didn’t help. 

“Jaskier,” Geralt said, and Jaskier opened his eyes. The witcher was looking at him, almost pleading. “Take my medallion, and get the map, and put it into your belt pouch so you have it.”

There was no point resisting. Jaskier sighed, retrieved the map from the table, and turned to show Geralt that he was putting it into his pouch. “Do I have to take the medallion?” he asked. Geralt nodded, and tipped his head up so it was easier to slip the heavy chain off over his head. Jaskier grimaced; it was much heavier than he’d thought, but he put it into his pouch. It was still warm from Geralt’s body, and he wiped his hands on his shirt to try to dispel the feeling.

“It won’t really prove anything,” Geralt said, “but it will help, because if you have it then either you killed me or found me dead.”

“Wha-- can you prove who you are without it?” Jaskier yelped.

“I can,” Geralt said. “I just wouldn’t give it up to anyone lightly.”

Jaskier retrieved the green potion, and offered it to Geralt, who looked at it with what might have been trepidation. “What does this one do?” he asked.

“Nothing good,” Geralt said. He grunted, grimacing; he’d tried to move. “I can’t do it, you’ll have to pour it in for me. Listen, don’t spill any on yourself.”

“That sounds bad,” Jaskier said, but there was no help for it, he unfastened the thong holding the cork in place, and very carefully worked the cork out, setting it down and using the knife so that he could pry it out carefully. The cork was slightly burnt-looking at the bottom, and a drop fell from it and smoked on the table. 

Suitably intimidated, he poured it into Geralt’s mouth. Geralt choked, but managed to get it down, and Jaskier put the bottle back on the table and pushed the cork back into it so the drops wouldn’t catch anything on fire.

Geralt was holding his breath. Jaskier sat down next to him. “I can’t believe Ciri just abandoned us like this,” he said. He’d expected her to come wandering back in. 

Geralt shook his head slightly, coughed a little, and let his breath out. It steamed-- no, it was smoke, curling up out of his throat. He coughed again. “You have to find her,” he rasped. 

“Let’s concentrate on surviving the next quarter of an hour,” Jaskier said, “and then we’ll address that.”

Geralt nodded, just breathing. When he opened his eyes again, they’d gone unnervingly black, eyelid to eyelid, edge to edge. Jaskier had seen that look before but it was somehow worse now that Geralt was so clearly dying. 

“Shut up,” Geralt murmured. 

“I didn’t say anything,” Jaskier said.

“Not you,” Geralt said. “The mornat. It’s--” He breathed. “Taunting me.”

“That’s not good,” Jaskier said.

“It doesn’t understand what we’re planning,” Geralt said. “They’re not that smart. But they’re not mindless either.” He paused to breathe. His all-black eyes didn’t roll back visibly anymore, but Jaskier could tell he was still fighting to stay conscious from the way the lids moved around the expressionless void inside them. His veins had come up black on his neck, and he smelled even more like death. 

“That doesn’t reassure me,” Jaskier said. He re-settled himself on the bed, on the side where he could see the thing trying to pry Geralt’s ribs apart. 

“Listen,” Geralt said. “Try to get the knife between the second and third vertebrae at the head edge of it. Push very hard, try to get all the way through it.”

“Okay,” Jaskier said, grimacing in distaste. He could see which end was the head, and sure enough, he could count the bumps and tell exactly what Geralt meant. 

“Don’t worry about me,” Geralt said. “The knife won’t do any worse to me than the mornat is doing.”

“Fuck you,” Jaskier said, and then bit his lip very hard so he wouldn’t cry. “Fuck you for making me do this.”

“I’m sorry,” Geralt said, and closed his eyes. His breathing was very labored now. “For everything.” He breathed again. “Once you stab it, twist the knife if you can. It’ll struggle.” He breathed again. “The potion is going to leave me in a bad state so I won’t-- be able to tell you-- any more.” He had to stop to breathe. “But once you’ve done as much damage as you can in one blow-- leave the knife-- and run. Go fast. Take Roach. Go. Find Ciri. Don’t look back.”

“This isn’t going to do you a damn bit of good,” Jaskier said. “You’re just trying to make me feel better about stabbing you, but it’s no better than if I just stabbed you.”

“It’s not-- too late-- to just stab me,” Geralt said, with a ghastly grin. “Same deal, between the second and third vertebrae, and twist it hard.”

“No,” Jaskier said, and he did start crying then, but silently. He bit down fiercely to keep from making a sound, and the tears slipped down his face. He dashed them away with his sleeve. 

Geralt was watching him with those expressionless all-black eyes, but his mouth was curved, a little wryly. “I _am_ sorry,” he said. “More than I can say. You didn’t deserve that, and you don’t deserve this.”

“Fuck you,” Jaskier said. 

“I was wrong that I didn’t need you,” Geralt went on in a moment. “And I do need you now. I need you to save her.”

“Fuck you,” Jaskier said, and there was no point trying not to cry, so he did. “Fuck you, Geralt.”

Geralt grimaced, as the thing moved-- it was moving a lot, Jaskier realized, more than it had been. It was making its move. Geralt screamed, finally, a horrible hoarse sound. “Now,” Geralt cried, “now, give me the-- the brown one--”

Jaskier had to wrench the cork out, and did spill some on himself, but this one didn’t catch fire so he kept moving and shoved it between Geralt’s teeth. He had to shove Geralt back against the wall by the collarbones, and tip the bottle into his mouth. Geralt’s jaw slammed shut and broke the bottle and there was glass and blood everywhere.

“Now,” Geralt roared, and Jaskier grabbed up the knife and, shit, the thing was _moving_ , he hadn’t expected-- he shoved his left hand against Geralt’s breastbone, pinning him to the wall, and then jammed the silver knife in as hard as he could, and then he yanked it out and shoved it back into where the creature had moved and this time he had it, there was blood everywhere and then there was black goo and Geralt was screaming and he was screaming and he jammed the knife in as deep as it would go and _twisted_ it, and Geralt screamed and writhed and then shouted “Jaskier, _go_ \--” 

And Jaskier left the knife where it was and scrambled back, sobbing, and scrabbled his way out the door as Geralt got up from the bed-- _no_ \-- and was moving, lurching, not his own gait, O God, the thing was _moving_ him-- Jaskier screamed and slammed the door and scrabbled up his pack and ran out into the night and _fuck_ he hadn’t saddled the horses, he threw the saddlebags at his horse and Roach, the fucking bitch, lunged at him and tried to bite him, god damn it, Geralt was still screaming in the house and this was a nightmare and why had he agreed to do this? Why? Why? “Fuck you, Geralt of Rivia,” he sobbed, “fuck you.”

Someone suddenly loomed up behind him and he spun around, resigning himself to an unpleasant death, but the hand that caught him hadn’t recently belonged to Geralt.

“What,” a woman’s voice said, and then there was an unpleasant moment of silence as he stared at Yennefer of Vengeburg.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Jaskier shrieked, recoiling. 

“I found her!” Ciri said, appearing suddenly next to her, bouncing on her toes. “I used my-- abilities-- and I found the Yennefer everyone’s been talking about!”

“What the _fuck_ ,” Yennefer said, grabbing his arm again.

“Oh, _fuck you_ ,” Jaskier said, and he was sobbing and he didn’t care. “Oh fuck you _all_ , I hate _every one_ of you.”

“What the fuck happened?” Yennefer demanded. “Jaskier, what did you _do_?”

Jaskier tried incoherently to explain firstly, what was going on, and secondly, that they were all likely in imminent danger, and Yennefer listened for approximately half a moment until he’d managed the words _Geralt_ and _mornat_ before she flung herself away from him and ran into the house. 

“Why didn’t you wait for me?” Ciri demanded, almost as frantic and tearful as Jaskier.

“There wasn’t time! And you didn’t _tell_ \-- you just _vanished_ \-- It was-- going through his _ribcage_ \-- I couldn’t-- he _begged_ me to--” Jaskier was to the point of complete incoherence by now, and he found abruptly that his legs wouldn’t hold him, so he slid to the ground and sat there, gibbering. He was covered in-- stuff, blood and worse and his ears were ringing to the point that he couldn’t tell whether Geralt were still screaming or not. 

It was a few moments before he could pull himself together enough to struggle to his feet and try to re-orient himself in whatever was going on. If Geralt were transformed into an undead monster he’d’ve come out and eaten Jaskier by now, surely. He rubbed his face, grimaced as his hand came away sticky-- or maybe it had been sticky already and now his face was sticky-- and staggered to the door of the ruined cottage.

Ciri was standing in the main room with her arms crossed over her chest, staring. There was a bright glow coming from the open bedroom door, which was smashed. Jaskier staggered in and stood next to Ciri, and looked in, dreading what he’d see.

Yennefer was standing there with her face tranquil and beautiful, and her arms outstretched, and Geralt was half-floating with his head tilted back and light shining out of his whole torso and maybe he was dead but there was already less blood everywhere. There was a black shape writhing in the air, with a silver knife sticking out of it, but it was pulling farther and farther away from Geralt’s body. 

As Jaskier watched, Geralt sank back down onto the bed, and the black shape writhed in midair. Yennefer’s face twisted (attractively, somehow), and she clenched her hand and the shape folded in on itself and suddenly vanished with a crack. The silver knife rang as it bounced off the edge of the table and embedded itself into the packed-dirt floor. 

“There,” Yennefer said, with evident satisfaction. “That’s done it. Now.” She brushed her hands together, and walked toward Geralt, who was still faintly glowing. He seemed unconscious. She held her hand out over his torso, palm downward, and set her jaw in determination. 

“She did it,” Ciri said, delighted, hopping in place and clapping her hands a little.

“Great,” Jaskier said. He watched for a few more moments, as Yennefer radiated beautifully and Geralt gently glowed with, like, healing light or some bullshit like that. Finally Geralt’s eyes opened, and he gazed at Yennefer, and she gazed back at him, and they stared at each other for a little while, looking dreamy and mutually-entranced and all that sort of nonsense.

“Well,” Jaskier said. “I’m glad this worked out.”

Ciri hummed faintly in answer, not taking her eyes off the beautiful, glowing pair.

Jaskier turned, walked back out the door, saddled his horse, put his pack on it, debated leaving some of his supplies with the others, but then decided that if they had a powerful mage and a newly-healed Witcher, they didn’t need his stale bread. So he got on the horse and rode away. 

Nobody inside the cottage noticed or stopped him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a long solo car ride in between posting the first and second chapters and in all that spare time I realized with a sort of grim amusement that what this is, is an #ownvoices story about what being 40 is really like, since nobody on Tumblr seems to have any real notion of it. Hilarious!


	3. Glass Shards

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wasn't going to leave you hanging like that, friends.

  
  


Geralt woke suddenly with a horrible sense of foreboding, and a worse sense of disorientation. Something-- horrible had happened, or had been happening, or-- he couldn’t remember. He took an experimental breath. He was breathing. He was alive. For some reason, that was a surprise. 

The inside of his mouth tasted disgusting in the particular way that suggested that he’d taken too many potions and was going to be suffering the toxicity aftereffects for a while yet. He expected, then, that when he moved, he’d have a lot of half-healed injuries, but an experimental twitch didn’t send up any particular protests from his body. 

The room smelled of blood, and death, and people. There were at least two people in the room, breathing quietly, neither speaking. He breathed a little deeper, filtering out the scents to determine the identity of the people. Women, both. One was-- ah, one was Ciri, for sure, she was sitting quite close to him and she was awake. The other was-- 

The other sure smelled like Yennefer, with old sweat and dried blood and remnants of burning and the scent of having done a great deal of magic but not particularly recently. 

Someone else had been in the room, but the scent had faded and they’d been gone for hours by now. Geralt couldn’t get any more information than that.

He let himself show signs of waking, then, let himself twitch again, and breathe a little deeper. He heard Ciri notice, heard her lean forward, her clothing rustling. “Geralt?” she whispered. 

“Hm,” he said, and felt around his teeth with his tongue. Something was-- his probing tongue encountered something sharp, and he made a displeased little noise and turned his head slightly to spit out-- 

A shard of glass. He’d had glass in his mouth. Why was there glass in his mouth? He blinked at it, as it lay bloody on the rumpled coverlet of the bed. It looked like the glass from a potion bottle. He worked his mouth, grimacing, and found a few other little shards that had probably been embedded in his gums, and his body had pushed them out while he was unconscious. 

“Pah,” he said, spitting them out, and he collected himself and sat up. It was harder than he expected to get his arm under himself and push himself up.

Oh, there had been an injury, all right, all down his right side, up against his ribs, new scar tissue pulling at the tissue there-- but it was more healed than it should have been. He was weak, he was in pretty bad shape overall, but the tissue was all knit back together and decently-healed. He turned his head, and rubbed his face, and saw then who’d magically healed him. 

Yennefer was sitting across the room on a trunk, legs crossed, arms folded primly, looking cool and unfriendly. “So,” she said. “He lived.”

“Geralt,” Ciri said. “You’re all right. _Are_ you all right?” She was on the only chair in the room, next to the bed, and she looked tired and worried but not much worse for wear than when last he’d seen her. 

Whenever that was.

“I don’t remember,” Geralt said, frowning at the realization. “What was-- where are we? How did we get here?”

“There was a mornat,” Yennefer said. 

“Why don’t I remember that?” Geralt rubbed at his side. His shirt wasn’t torn but he’d certainly been stabbed, at some point. With his shirt off-- the garment was relatively undamaged. Why had his shirt been off? What the hell happened here? 

“It was in you for three days,” Ciri said, with a slightly wobbly quality to her voice that he could tell meant she’d been badly frightened about it. 

“Ah,” he said. That explained the toxic hangover. He’d probably gone through most of his store of potions trying to stave it off. Not that he’d had many left to begin with, after the-- however long it had been since he’d last re-stocked. 

Magic didn’t really help the toxicity issue. He was going to feel pretty awful for rather a while, it felt like. But at least the stabbing was fixed. Yennefer must have had to cut the thing out. Stood to reason she’d’ve taken his shirt off for that.

“You’re welcome,” Yennefer said. “You were just about dead when I got here.”

“How did you find us?” Geralt asked. 

“I found her,” Ciri volunteered, lighting up. “When I saw how bad the mornat was, I went out into the woods and I focused myself, I really focused, and I tried to project myself out.”

“Every mage within a hundred miles could have seen you,” Yennefer said. “It was not a safe thing to do. But I saw you first, and shielded you from the others, and fortunately I wasn’t far away. But it wasn’t wise, Ciri. Don’t do it again.”

“But I found you when it counted,” Ciri said.

“Yes,” Yennefer said. “You did.” She looked at Geralt. “So... I met your child surprise.”

“You did,” Geralt said. It was hard not to feel warmed by that, somehow. It was nearly dawn, and gray light was leaking in at the window, just a little, and Yennefer’s eyes were their normal beautiful violet, and not as cold as they could be, all else considered, and Ciri was beaming at her in delight. This could be all right.

“She needs training,” Yennefer said. “But I rather think Aretuza is not going to continue on as it was.”

“I wouldn’t send her there,” Geralt said. 

“Good,” Yennefer said. “What do you plan to do with her?”

“I was going to Caer Morhen,” Geralt said. “I can’t think of anywhere else safe.”

Yennefer frowned. “It might be your only option,” she said. 

“You,” Geralt began, but then couldn’t think how to continue it. 

“I will not be traveling with you,” she said. “While I narrowly concede that it’s for the best if you continue to exist in this world, I do not think it benefits me to associate any more closely with you than I must.”

“Yennefer,” Geralt said.

She stood up. “It wasn’t real,” she said. “Nothing we had was ever real. I don’t want to spend any more time any closer to you than I have to. If you’re healed, then I can go. I have a lot to do.”

Geralt moved his legs experimentally. They moved. Grimly, he told her, “I am healed.”

“Then,” she said, and swept out the doorway, “farewell,” and that was that. 

Ciri watched her go with wide eyes, then turned to Geralt, baffled.

“That actually went really well,” he told her, and set about collecting himself. 

  
  


Ciri clung to him tighter than usual as they rode. She had been badly frightened. It was only coming back to Geralt in little flashes, here and there-- the feeling of the thing moving under his skin, tiny at first, and then growing-- the way he’d slid sideways out of his own mind sometimes from the pain-- a snippet of falling off of Roach and not being able to get back up-- and one terrible flash of searing pain, screaming, his jaw slamming shut with a potion bottle in his mouth and the shards of glass-- that must have been quite near the end. 

At one point he remembered frightened blue eyes that weren’t Ciri’s. Narrower-set ones, dark lashes. But he couldn’t connect it to anything else. Over his long lifetime he’d accumulated a lot of memories like that, so he dismissed it after turning it around for a few moments and failing to find anywhere to fit it in. 

He steered them toward a village, and as they passed the outlying houses Ciri tightened her arms around him. “We can’t stop here,” she said quietly.

“Why not?” he asked. He was in rough enough shape not to relish spending a night out from under shelter, with all the corpses around and the number of monsters who thrived on that sort of thing having a little population explosion. He had one sole bottle of potion left, a healing one he wasn’t going to touch while all of his guts burned like this. No potions for sight in the dark, nothing for augmented reflexes, nothing for making his blood poison; he might as well be a standard human, for that and how depleted he was. His ribs all stuck out and he knew he looked gaunt all over. No armor, no silver weapons. They needed to get indoors for a night, and he needed to meditate and then sleep and then meditate some more and maybe drink about three gallons of water while he was at it.

Ciri shook her head. “All the towns along this route-- there are so many refugees, and so much trouble-- they’re not very welcoming to visitors and there are no spare rooms left.”

“How do you know this?” Geralt asked, genuinely baffled. She hadn’t been by this way before, they’d been traveling away from the places she’d wandered while lost.

“This is the way I came when I went for help,” she said.

“You went for help? I thought you called Yennefer from the woods.”

She shook her head, and since she had her cheek pressed against the back of his shoulder, he could read the gesture without turning. “First I rode into town,” she said. “I was gone most of the day. The bard told me the alderman had been killing anyone who made a fuss, because he was afraid.”

“The bard,” Geralt said, and for some reason it went cold through his chest. 

“You knew him,” she said.

“When did I know him?” he said carefully, realizing that the days he was missing certainly contained some events, and that admitting he was missing them was likely to spook Ciri. Magical healing surely seemed to her like a complete fix-it, and she’d been in a tentatively good mood all day because she thought they were all better now and everything was fine, and fuck, it was _exhausting_ to have that kind of pressure of faith on you, Geralt had dealt with it before but he was out of practice. 

“He was the first help I brought back,” she said slowly, a frown in her voice. “You spoke to him a long time. At first you were calling him Eskel.”

“Eskel’s not a bard,” Geralt said, and hope spiked sharply but he squashed it down. Eskel was not active in this area, and if he had come to help, they wouldn’t have needed Yennefer. 

“Who is Eskel?” she asked. She was so nosy, all the time, she wanted to know everything about his life, and he couldn’t blame her, but he also couldn’t tell her to fuck off the way he’d always been able to tell everyone else. 

He sighed. “Another witcher,” he said. 

“That’s what the bard said,” Ciri said. “Is that all? Is he a friend of yours? Do Witchers make friends with other Witchers?”

He _really_ couldn’t tell her to fuck off, she was his child now. He had to make an effort, so he dragged up enough effort to elaborate. “We trained together, from boyhood. I’ve known him most of my life. But if _he_ had come by, we’d be in a damn sight better position than we are now.” Eskel would have the toxicity remedy on him, and would have a silver sword, and would be able to fucking _protect_ them, better than Geralt’s useless self could manage at this wretched moment.

They were coming up on the center of town, and he wished she’d spoken up earlier so they could have avoided it. Towns were dangerous for witchers, because either they’d be driven off or they’d be asked to do something. Undoubtedly, if these people had a moment’s attention to spare him, they were going to demand he do something about the hordes of ghouls and such, the undead creatures, the corpse-eaters, the carrion-attracted creatures that were infesting these woods. And he was in no shape to fight monsters. He was in no shape to survive so much as a too-pointed conversation. At this point, a stiff breeze had a pretty good chance at beating him. He put his head down and rode through without pausing, and while frightened eyes looked out through windows, no one came out to stop him.

“You kept calling me weird names too, I suppose,” Ciri said. She laughed nervously. “You called me Mum at one point.”

Geralt sighed. “That’s,” he said. “I was very sick, Ciri.” Great. What had he said?

“Oh,” she said, and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’ve been going by Fiona, that’s what I said when I was here asking for help yesterday.”

“Fiona,” he said. “Right. Fine. I’ll try to remember.” They were nearly out of the town. It wasn’t too late, they could perhaps make it to another town by nightfall, but he wasn’t excited at the prospect. Still, it was probably for the best to get some distance between them and the place where Ciri had, unshielded, revealed her power to any mage listening. There were mages hunting her, and Geralt was in no shape to evade them.

“You should get a false name too,” she said. “Hmmm. Do you have a middle name? Fiona’s my middle name.”

“No,” he said. 

“Well, then we’ll have to choose you one,” she said. “Hmmm.” She proceeded to run through a list of entirely unsuitable names, all of which were obviously the names of various men who had been in her household in Cintra. He made noncommittal noises at all of them, and kept his eyes out for trouble as they came up on the outskirts of town.

But no one came out, no one accosted them, and they passed the last grouping of houses without incident. “They had us locked in that barn for ages,” Ciri said, “while the alderman was deciding what to do with the refugees. It was rather upsetting. But the bard was singing for us, at least, that helped a lot.”

Somehow Geralt had gotten distracted from that question, earlier. He was uncomfortably aware that his mind wasn’t working well. His reflexes were probably not even up to par with standard humans at this point. And his kidneys hurt, which was a pretty good sign that he was going to piss blood the next time he tried. He was dangerously overloaded with toxins from all the potions, and it was making him foggy and achy and pretty damned ineffective, really. He needed to get off the road, under cover, somewhere with a door that locked and, preferably, had some kind of heating-- even the stress of keeping himself warm was too much for his body in this state. 

“The bard,” he said, wrenching his mind back on track. “You never finished telling me the story. I called him Eskel, but then what?”

“Oh,” Ciri said, “you knew him, and told him he’d have to cut the mornat out of you, and he told you to fuck off.”

“Ciri,” Geralt said repressively.

“He said, you can’t scold me for using that word, if I’m just relaying a message directly!” she protested, and her voice shook on a laugh for once. Geralt had to push down a smile at the sound of it. Fortunately, he was facing away from her, so he didn’t have to push it very far. 

“You’re not relaying a message, you’re carrying tales,” he said. “It’s not the same. It’s actually even worse than just using the word yourself.”

“No, no,” she said, “there was a message first. When he first was coming with me to help, he saw Roach and recognized her, and he said--”

“He _recognized_ Roach?” Part of the appeal of always choosing a brown horse with a white stripe and a white foot or two was that people usually didn’t really recognize the horse. Even him; he recognized the individual horses, sure, but if he picked new ones with similar enough markings, it made it easier for them to blend together in his mind to seem like the same animal, and let him minimize the sting of loss every time one of his Roaches got killed or lost or got too old.

“She tried to bite him,” Ciri said. “That was when I realized he was telling the truth and he really knew you. I think Roach recognized him too.”

A woman was out in the yard of the farmhouse they were passing, and Geralt tried not to let on that he was watching her on high alert. She stood with a hand on her hip, watching them pass, but said nothing, made no sound or cry, didn’t seem alarmed. It seemed awkward, so he made a little gesture of salute to her. 

She returned it, and gave him a grim little half-smile. “Be careful out there,” she said. “There’s ghouls.”

“Don’t let your fire go out,” he told her. “It’ll keep you as safe as anything can.”

She nodded, and they passed by. Ciri turned around to look at her.

They’d been talking about something. Geralt had lost the thread of it. His head was aching, too, now. He breathed through it, and mentally inventoried: kidneys, head, lungs, liver. If he’d swallowed any glass shards that was going to be fairly miserable for a while as well. Reflexes dulled. No silver sword, no armor. Not even his own normal night vision; he could already tell he was sick enough that he’d be no better than standard human, or possibly even worse. 

No, they absolutely had to get inside somewhere tonight, even if it was just a barn. At least they had food, though he wasn’t sure he could be trusted to prepare it. He didn’t think he’d be able to eat, though he also knew he needed to.

It was most usually some dramatic event that killed Witchers on the path, if the stories were to be believed-- some exceptionally nasty beastie, or a mob, or a sorceror, or something-- but Geralt had, over the years, compiled enough observations to note that really, what most often genuinely did the trick was a run of bad luck. He’d survived enough dramatic horrors to know that it wasn’t a single event that was going to do for him, in the end. One probably would get the credit, but so many times it was that a string of bad events had accumulated to the point that one otherwise-survivable thing was enough to be fatal.

He was at that point now, where literally a dozen things, each of which were fairly minor, were now clamoring right at the gate of killing him. This was bad.

If he died, Ciri was on her own, and she wasn’t ready for it. She’d made her way to him alone, by wits and luck and having some poorly-explained abilities, but she’d had him as a stated goal to work toward. If he up and died on her, he rather thought she’d be a great deal less prepared to survive on her own than she would be if she’d never found him. Surely Destiny wouldn’t play so cruel a trick, but then, Geralt wasn’t sure Destiny had enough sentience to have “cruel” be a meaningful concept. 

It could be that the destiny he was supposed to fill for Ciri was just to set her on a path toward something else entirely. He should prepare her for that. But how to broach the topic, when she’d been so frightened for so long?

“Szymon,” Ciri said. 

Geralt’s mind snapped back to the conversation, but he groped in vain for what she could possibly mean. “What?” he said. 

“Szymon,” she said again. “It’s a good name.”

What had they been talking about? “For who?” he asked. “The bard?” Right, the bard. He’d thought-- “I don’t know a bard named Szymon.”

“No, silly,” she said, “for _you_. Your fake name. To go with Fiona.”

If he said _what_ again she might notice he wasn’t tracking. “Uh,” he said. “I don’t. Hm.” 

“So that’s your fake name,” she said. “I’ll call you that whenever you’re around people.”

“I,” Geralt said. That sounded confusing. “I doubt I’ll answer to it.”

“Well, you wouldn’t answer to any of the others,” she said. 

“Why can’t you call me by my name?” he asked. 

“Because,” she said, “we’re on the _lam_ , we need secret identities.”

“I’m not a lost princess,” Geralt said. “I just have my regular enemies to worry about.” He shook his head slightly. “Anyway it’s not like there are so many witchers around that calling me by another name will somehow fool people that I’m one of them.”

“Nobody has to know you’re a Witcher,” Ciri said.

That made Geralt laugh, which hurt. All of the middle of his body hurt. His joints were starting to hurt too. Oh, and his head, mustn’t forget that. “Ciri,” he said.

“Fiona,” she said, which didn’t make any sense. He didn’t know a Fiona. 

“I can’t exactly pass for a normal human,” he said. “I don’t know if you maybe don’t get out much, but even if one discounts the hair, the eyes are normally a dead giveaway. There’s no point trying to pretend I’m not what I am.” And he put his hand to his chest to touch his medallion. It wasn’t that he wore it to mark what he was, though to other witchers it mattered a great deal as an affiliation marking, but he had always felt that it was a good indicator for regular people. 

It wasn’t there. He groped frantically for it, in case it was tangled in his shirt, or--

A memory slid into his mind like a shard of glass, of himself laboring to draw a map to Caer Morhen, in case he didn’t survive, and he’d meant to give the map and medallion to-- 

“Ciri,” he said, “the map I gave you-- did I give you my medallion with it?” They’d come too far, they couldn’t possibly turn around and go back to that ruin to look for his medallion. But he needed it. It was-- it wasn’t just a piece of jewelry. It was-- it was a symbol of what he was, what he came from, and it was an important part of how he did his job with its ability to detect monsters, and he never took it off, and he had to close his eyes and grit his teeth as his thumping heart made his headache and his joints ache worse with every beat. 

“You didn’t give me a map,” she said, puzzled. 

The memory pushed a bit farther into his mind, and he clearly saw the map he’d drawn, and then he saw it, folded, Ciri was showing it to him as she put it into her belt pouch-- no, Ciri didn’t wear a belt pouch, it was someone else-- 

“The bard,” he said. “Did he-- actually come--” 

“I wasn’t carrying tales about him,” she said. “His exact message was this, precisely, when Roach tried to bite him. He said, _You can tell him Jaskier told him to go fuck himself, and he can’t be cross with you for relaying a message accurately_.”

Jaskier. “Jaskier,” he said. Jaskier! It hurt, it really hurt, to think of Jaskier, who’d been on so many of his adventures, who’d been so amusing, who’d been so much trouble, who’d been too much, and Geralt had spent years guiltily telling himself he needed to push the bard away, and those same years telling himself there was no harm in allowing himself the indulgence of the bard’s annoying but amusing company, and of course this tension had manifested itself in exactly the single worst possible way for him to handle it.

“Oh,” Ciri said, sounding pleased. “He was right! You can’t be mad at me.”

Of course Jaskier had told her to tell him to fuck himself. “Well,” Geralt said, and it was hard to speak. It hurt. He’d consoled himself that Jaskier was better off without him, that _everyone_ was better off without him, and had tried to fool himself that really he couldn’t possibly have hurt the bard’s feelings that much, people said horrible things to Jaskier all the time and he was never much daunted. But that was undeniable evidence that the fellow was still holding a grudge. And he was justified in doing so. 

But gods, Geralt wished he could see him. Even just-- to see him across a room, and not to speak to him, and just see that he was all right, and remember-- how it had felt, to have something that could pass for a friend, and-- agh, he was being a fool.

And his memory was helpfully giving him little flashes of Jaskier now, his amusing turns of phrase and various of their adventures, and a surprisingly vivid memory of Jaskier’s face, teary-eyed, saying _fuck you, Geralt, fuck you for making me do this_.

That was puzzling, and didn’t fit into any contexts.

“Well what,” Jaskier said. 

Geralt thought about it for a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t possibly apologize for what I said.”

“Er,” Jaskier said. “That’s. Okay?”

“No,” Geralt said. “It’s not okay. I can’t take my own problems out on people like that and not expect it to come back and bite me.” He shook his head. “But even without a selfish motivation it’s still wrong. I’m not a good person but that doesn’t mean I can behave badly.”

“You’re not,” Jaskier said, “ _not_ a good person, _really_ , though.”

“I am not a good person,” Geralt said. “I try to adhere to a moral code as much as I can but that’s not-- that doesn’t make you _good_ , it doesn’t mean you can stop thinking about it. Any person is only as good as their actions and mine are pretty damned mixed.”

“What if you do a bad thing but it’s because you have no choice?” Jaskier asked, sounding weirdly young and uncertain. 

“There’s always a choice,” Geralt said. “There’s always-- people always go on about _the lesser evil, the lesser evil_ \-- it’s still evil, it being less than some other evil doesn’t make it _not_ evil, you’ve got to open up your thinking and recognize that evil is evil and there’s almost always another choice nobody’s telling you about.” He thought about it, bleak. Everything had weird hard bright rainbow edges, as he looked at them, and everything hurt, he had glass shards in his knees and elbows and hips and spine, between all his vertebrae, and a little glass shard of memory slid out of his gums and showed him Jaskier, crying. 

“But you have to survive,” Jaskier insisted. 

“Everyone dies,” Geralt said. “Everyone-- some of us are ageless but that doesn’t mean we can’t die, doesn’t mean we _shouldn’t_ die. And sometimes your choices just all catch up to you. If I were a better person, I would have friends who could help me, but I’m not, and I don’t, I don’t deserve them to help me even now that I need it, badly.”

“You have me,” Jaskier said, uncertainly.

Geralt had to take a moment and breathe to keep his composure. “I don’t deserve you,” he said. “Not after what I’ve done. But I need-- I know, I told you I didn’t need anyone, I spent a long time pushing people away and making myself unpleasant so they wouldn’t come back, and it’s going to kill me, now. I need help. Jaskier, I’m sorry, and I can’t possibly make it up to you.”

“I’m Ciri,” Jaskier said. 

“Ciri,” Geralt said. Yes, that was the center of all of this. “She needs me, but I can’t--”

“ _I’m_ Ciri,” Jaskier said again. 

“Yes,” Geralt said. “Listen. Destiny brought her and I together, but what if it wasn’t that Destiny intended me to get her to her destination? I might only be a stepping-stone along the way. If I die on the Path I can’t see her journey through. But what’s important is to keep moving on the trail Destiny has laid out.”

“I,” Jaskier said, then finished wearily, “well, we _are_.”

“Yes,” Geralt said. He badly wanted to cry, but bottled it up firmly. He was uncomfortably aware that he didn’t have perfect control over his tongue. Everything hurt, so badly, and he had to piss and that was going to hurt, and he didn’t know if he’d be able to get off the horse, or back on it once he was off. “I need to stop.”

He did manage to get off the horse, pissed blood, drank a lot of water, and Ciri managed to put together a midday meal of sorts for them, though she was clearly inexpert. He couldn’t eat, though he managed to force down some bread, at least. He kept looking around, expecting someone else to be there, but it was only the two of them. He was sweating now-- a high fever, which in a normal human meant one thing but for him meant he was badly overloaded with toxins and sickness. Yennefer had taken out the mornat and all the filth it had spewed as it was dying, and she’d healed up the damages, but she hadn’t detoxified his blood which was absolutely teeming with exotic poisons from the collection of potions he’d frantically downed to keep himself alive. 

He couldn’t exactly blame her; it was a medical issue largely unique to Witchers, he rather thought, and one that a mage accustomed to healing humans and other mages wouldn’t even know to look for. But he probably should have anticipated this and asked her for help, and it was too late to do that now but it was also a much larger problem than he’d realized. It was perfectly likely there wasn’t anything she could’ve done for him anyhow.

“We _have_ to get to shelter tonight,” he told Ciri. She was looking frightened again, and he hated that, but there was nothing he could do about it. “There are too many necrophages in these woods, and I don’t have the tools to fight them. I need to recover.”

“I thought Yennefer healed you,” she said, her voice small and frightened.

“She did,” Geralt said. “But magical healing can only do so much. You have to give your body time, as well.”

“Oh,” she said. 

Geralt didn’t remember getting back on the horse, and some time later he was startled to realize that he didn’t remember whatever had happened in the intervening time, but at least he didn’t think he’d been running his mouth. “Did I,” he said, but he didn’t know how to finish the question. They were-- somewhere along the road, and it was-- late afternoon, at the least. The road showed signs of heavy traffic like they were approaching a town, but he didn’t know where they were.

“Are you all there?” Jaskier asked, a little peevishly. 

“All where?” Geralt asked. “Where are we?”

“On the road,” Jaskier said, like it was obvious. “Really, what’s wrong with you?”

Geralt wriggled his shoulders; he rarely let Jaskier ride with him, but when he did, the man wasn’t usually quite so clingy. Geralt was all sweat down his back, his hair matted to his neck with it, and he felt like a dishrag somebody had wrung out. A dishrag full of glass shards. 

“A whole bunch of poison,” he said. “Did we talk about this? I feel like we talked about this.”

“We talked about a lot of things,” Jaskier said. He sounded-- irritated, but frightened too, and it wasn’t very-- like him. Jaskier almost never showed fear, it was one of his more endearing annoying qualities-- only ever acute fear, never a sensible low-key ongoing dread. If he felt that, he had never let on, anyway. So this was unexpected and unwelcome. 

He also sounded more shrill than normal, which was disorienting. He almost sounded like a little girl. “It’s all right,” Geralt said. “We’ll be all right. We just need to find somewhere safe to sleep for the night.”

“I think there’s a town coming up,” Jaskier said. 

“There had better be,” Geralt said. He rubbed his face, and shivered, casting a wary eye over the woods. He could smell a faint scent of death, and it felt strange to him that his medallion hadn’t alerted him to any ghouls. They’d be asleep now, sheltered somewhere away from the light, but he still-- he put his hand to his chest, and was suddenly struck cold with dread when he didn’t find his medallion there. “Where’s,” he said, then remembered, he’d given it with the map to-- who? Who had he given it to? Ciri. But if Jaskier was-- where was-- “Ciri?” he said, turning his head.

“What?” she said, looking up from where she’d had her head resting against his back. 

“Oh,” he said. “You’re.” He turned around, and faced forward. “Where’s Jaskier?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He left sometime after Yennefer arrived.”

“He left?” Geralt turned again, glancing down over his shoulder at Ciri. “Out here? Traveling alone? That’s suicide.”

“He had been traveling alone before I found him,” Ciri said defensively. “I think, anyway. I mean, I found him in a barn full of children, but.” She looked apologetic. “I didn’t think he was going to leave. I wasn’t paying attention, you were so badly injured.”

“I didn’t know he was there,” Geralt said. “Why didn’t he come in?”

Ciri didn’t answer, for a moment. “Er,” she said, “he _did_ , Geralt. You talked to him for a long time and then you made him stab the mornat.”

Geralt thought it was about time he held his tongue. He had no memory of talking to Jaskier. He hoped he’d apologized. He rubbed his face tiredly. “Well,” he said. Fine job he was doing of not frightening Ciri more than she already was. He sighed. “I’m not handling this very well, am I.” He put his hand to his chest again, panicked again, remembered he’d already panicked about it, and had to accept that he wasn’t going to be able to figure it out right this moment. 

“If there’s no inn in this town,” Ciri said.

“We’ll find someplace to shelter,” Geralt said, trying to sound confident. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen, a minor canon note, I did like thirty seconds of Googling about how potions work in the various Witcher canons and I make no representations to having either any deep game-mechanics knowledge OR real-life understanding of how human bodies work so please do not take my unreliable narrator too seriously here, if I got something wrong my excuse is that Geralt has no idea what's happening either and maybe he's just misreporting it.


	4. Hot Water

  
  


“Please tell me,” Jaskier said, catching gently at the sleeve of the young woman who had just dropped off a tray full of mugs of ale at a table, “that there is at least one room left in this inn.”

“You’d have to talk to Himself,” she said, jerking her chin over toward the counter at the far end of the room, “but we’ve half the occupants of the known world in this place, it’s tight in here.”

Jaskier made his way over to the counter. He’d halfway thought of trying to barter his entertainment services for a room, but it seemed like space might really be at a premium, and, well-- he had enough money for this room, and he was so exhausted he probably wouldn’t want to play once he was settled in. Provided he _could_ settle in. He sent up a quiet little prayer to whatever deity or power might be listening, to _please_ , please this _once_ , let this go his way and let him just _rest_.

The innkeeper was just coming out of the room behind the counter, and he saw Jaskier and tipped his head back a little. “Ah, are you looking for a room?” he asked, grimacing a little.

“I am,” Jaskier said. 

“Hmm,” the man said. He had a large bushy moustache. “We’ve got something of a situation at the moment, but I think there’s somewhat…” He pulled out a ledger and unfolded a leaf of it, running his finger down to look, then glanced over his nose at Jaskier, tipping his head back again-- he was a bit nearsighted, Jaskier recognized the mannerism. “Is it just you, then?”

“Yes,” Jaskier said. 

“Any horses needing stabling?”

“Ah, one,” he said, “though, I mean, neither she nor I is fussy.”

“The horse is fine,” the innkeeper said, “I’ve some room if she’s not a kicker. But the room… I have… well, it’s just so crowded, we’ve taken in some refugees here and there, what with all that’s going on, hmm.”

“I have coin,” Jaskier said, making up his mind. “I’m not-- in need of charity.”

“Oh,” the innkeeper said, peering at him again. “I won’t lie, that would be welcome. We’ve had so many hard cases come through. Just awful, all these goings-on.” He went back to the ledger. “There are a smattering of _spaces_ , I wouldn’t be so generous as to call them _rooms_ , but-- ah, yes, I _do_ have a room, a proper one even. I rather expect we’re going to have people sleeping in the hallways, there’s a group beginning to straggle in that says they’ve more behind them, from the next village over-- ah, at any rate. Let’s get you set up. You look, pardon my saying it, as if you’ve had a hard day.”

“I have,” Jaskier said. He’d spent the night awake and moving, terrified and paranoid but that had kept him out of the clutches of anything particularly horrifying. A few times a strong sense of foreboding had seemed to warn him of something dangerous nearby, and he’d avoided areas of the road, or backtracked until the sense of dread went away, and when dawn had come he’d turned his horse loose in a meadow and collapsed for about an hour of sleep before continuing to this village. “I-- I hate to ask, as crazy as it seems to be around here, but-- a bath? Would a bath be possible, at all, or at least a, a basin--”

“A bath would be no problem, my good man,” the innkeeper said. He leaned on the counter and looked weary. “I’m letting some of the refugees work so they feel they’re earning their keep. Something for them to do is always welcome.”

“Well,” Jaskier said. “Then I can pay now, for the room and the bath.”

“Oh, that would be helpful,” the innkeeper said. 

Jaskier opened his belt pouch and stared down into it directly at Geralt’s wolf medallion. “ _Fuck_ ,” he said, deeply and sincerely.

“Oh dear,” the innkeeper said, looking weary. Jaskier looked up at him, blank with horror, and then recollected himself. 

“Oh,” he said. “No, no, I have the coin, it’s fine, I just-- _fuck_.” He carefully moved the medallion aside and retrieved the correct number of coins, lining them up on the counter. “No, I’ve just realized-- argh, someone gave me something for safekeeping and I’ve just realized I did not return it to them and now I don’t know when I’ll see them again, and I--”

“Oh, dear,” the innkeeper said, more sympathetic and less weary. “That is troublesome.”

“It’s important,” Jaskier said. “I don’t even know how-- _fuck_.” Was it magical? Geralt touched it, sometimes, seemed to be reacting to it perhaps, but Jaskier had never exactly analyzed what was going on in those moments.

But he suddenly remembered all the times last night when he’d felt warned, somehow, of danger, and opened the pouch and looked down into it again. The medallion gleamed there, looking faintly wicked as it always did, hopelessly intimidating. Obviously it was extremely important, Geralt had said as much; other Witchers would assume he was dead, finding it not in his possession. 

“I don’t know what to do,” he said wearily, looking up at the innkeeper. “But I know I’m not going to do anything until I’ve had a bath and slept in a real bed.”

“What about a meal?” the innkeeper asked. “I could send it up to your room.”

Jaskier pulled another coin out of the purse and set it on the counter with a heartfelt nod, then fastened his purse back up. It was much lighter now, but still felt terribly heavy because of the medallion. His midsection felt heavy from the medallion, too. Fuck. He had that map, he could bring it to wherever the map had been meant to take him, but-- odds were very good it was very far out of the way of where he had been intending to go, and he did not relish the prospect of turning up there and explaining that he accidentally had the medallion of a not-dead Witcher. Were they likely to believe he had it innocently? From the stories, Geralt was by far the most cheerful and good-natured of the lot, which was saying something. 

“Fuck,” Jaskier sighed to himself. “I don’t know what I’m going to do about this.”

“I did notice you’ve a lute,” the innkeeper said. “Perhaps, tonight, if you’re feeling up to it-- well, you know.”

“I do know,” Jaskier said. “Listen, I can’t promise anything, I’m exhausted, but I do well know how important some cheering entertainment can be. I will keep it in mind.”

“Glad to hear it,” the innkeeper said.

Jaskier dragged himself and his scant luggage up the stairs once his horse was situated, and discovered that the room was at least satisfactory. Downright nice, by the standards he’d expected-- it was small, but there was actually an attached closet, awkwardly too small to be another room, but big enough to stow a lot of gear, which made up for the total lack of floor space in the main room. But the main room boasted a bed, a little table with a chair, and room for a basin. 

They prepared the bath in a room just down the hall, and Jaskier spent a blissful while in the tub, soaking out the stains from Geralt’s blood and whatever the black stuff had been, and soaking out a lot of terror in the process. He’d have to think what to do about the medallion later. 

He got out of the bath, dried off, came back to find a simple but welcome meal laid out for him on the little table, ate it ravenously, then collapsed facedown in the bed clad in only his shirt and slept for-- he didn’t know how long, didn’t care, it didn’t matter. He finally rose and dressed because it seemed stupid not to at least find out if anyone in this crowd had news.

He hesitated over it for a few moments, then took his lute case with him when he went downstairs. He’d somehow managed not to injure his hands in all the nonsense with Geralt. It seemed stupid not to be grateful for that. 

There was a great deal of news to be had in the inn, and he sat and slowly drank beer and caught up on all of the tidings, in the process managing to form no clearer notion of what exactly had befallen at Sodden, but finding out a great deal of the local troubles. The innkeeper was right, there were a lot of hard cases here. 

It wasn’t terribly long before Jaskier’s heart was softened enough that he got the lute out, tuned it up, and started playing. 

That passed an agreeable span, though there wasn’t much coin going around with which to tip-- but people kept sending over cups of small-beer or ale, or dishes of food, or other assorted things, piled in his lute case. He didn’t stop to inventory them, didn’t really look at them, until it was drawing down into evening, and the truly desperate started straggling in, in ones and twos. Jaskier set his lute aside and finished one of his cups of ale, giving himself a break to breathe. 

“You sing so beautifully,” a woman said, and he smiled at her, but not too warmly. Literally the last thing he wanted was a bed-companion tonight. For some reason, it just seemed like-- too much. He was weary down to his soul. 

“That’s my profession,” he said. “I’ve been playing for thirty years now.”

“No,” she said, gratifyingly shocked. He smiled at her again, and glanced into his lute case. 

Someone had given him a pair of wool socks. Someone else had given him a skein of beautiful bottle-green darning wool. It was almost painful, how sweet that was. And there were a few coins in the case, which was appreciated, and assorted small portable food items, which was also appreciated. 

“It’s,” he said, and then something caught his eye, yanking his attention away from the woman. In the crowd of people gathered at the far edge of the room, there was a face he recognized, a girl, white-blonde. She was standing in line along with a number of ragged and desperate-looking refugees. Why did he know her? He stared at her for a moment before it finally got through his thick skull that it was-- not Fiona. Ciri. Right. Geralt’s-- er, daughter.

He stood up, set the lute aside, and went over. The line of people were all the latecomers, desperate refugees, most of them ragged and battered, and the innkeeper was standing at his counter looking dourly down at his ledger. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I just don’t have rooms. I can fit a few of you into this room, but I just don’t know that I can fit you all.”

“Ci--” Jaskier said, then bit it off. “Fiona.” Geralt wasn’t there. Why wasn’t Geralt there? Had Geralt gotten so caught up in his reunion with Yennefer that he’d thrown out his own daughter?

She didn’t react at first, but then suddenly noticed him. “Jaskier,” she said. She had dirt on her face, and there were tracks through it where she’d been crying. She looked utterly miserable.

“Fiona, where’s Geralt? Did he--”

“Jaskier,” she said, starting forward and clutching at his hands, and her eyes spilled over with tears. “There’s no room for us here, I don’t know what to do.”

“Is it just you?” he asked. 

She shook her head, tears dropping freely. “No, but Geralt’s-- he’s, something’s wrong, he’s sick.”

“What happened to Yennefer?” Jaskier asked warily. If Geralt was here, then he could give Ciri the medallion and the map and-- but he couldn’t just turn them out into the ghoul-filled woods, that was beyond cruel.

Ciri shrugged, lip trembling and eyes welling even more. “She left. She only stayed until Geralt regained consciousness, and then she vanished. She said she didn’t want to spend any more time close to him than she had to, and then she just left.”

“Oh dear,” Jaskier said sourly. On the one hand, good; she was a crazy disaster. On the other, though, it meant Geralt would be a grumpy sack of shit.

Ciri leaned in even closer. “But he’s not _healed_ , Jaskier. He’s hurt, something’s wrong _inside_ him. He’s got a fever and he spent all day drifting off and talking nonsense. Half the day he kept calling me by your name, telling me things clearly meant for you.”

“By _my_ name,” Jaskier said, and he hated how immediately flattered he was, how much he wanted to know what Geralt had said to him. God, he was a fool and a _fool_ , to go dangling after that man, and yet, he had to know-- “So he thought--”

“He didn’t seem to remember that he’d seen you yesterday,” Ciri said, “and that was weird, but then he kept addressing me as you, and at one point he went on this whole rambling aside about how you-- Jaskier-- had to get me-- Cir, er, me--” She hesitated, and looked around at the others, who were all raptly watching their conversation. “Er, at any rate, telling me how you had to get me to safety and all sorts of nonsense about Destiny and how maybe he was just a stepping stone, and-- it was so creepy, and I kept reminding him I wasn’t you and he’d just sort of agree and go back to--” She broke off. “I don’t know how well you knew him but he kept trying to apologize to me and I think it’s because he thought I was you, and I cannot begin to imagine what he must have done to you last night that he was so sorry for, but he didn’t remember that you’d been there, and--”

The only reason she’d stopped crying, Jaskier rather thought, was how irritated she was at all of it. “Apologize,” he said. “Oh, no, dear, I don’t think it was last night he was trying to apologize for.”

It was terrible, how petty and yet easily satisfied he was, but just that little show of contrition-- well. He turned to the innkeeper, who was watching them along with everyone else in this ragged, desperate little group. “Is there stabling for one more horse? She’s awful but she doesn’t kick, at least.”

The innkeeper looked at him. “You’re willing to cram this poor wretch into your room with you?” he asked.

“I am,” Jaskier said. “Her father’s an old friend. It’s his-- sentimental thing I accidentally stole, so I suppose I’m just glad I can return it.”

The innkeeper regarded him, but said finally, “So, two of them?”

“Yes,” Ciri said, and fresh tears flowed down her cheeks. 

“I’ll send up food and some more bedding if I can find any,” the innkeeper said. Jaskier nodded and reached for his belt pouch. “No,” the innkeeper said, “for your singing-- no, it’s on the house. It’s the least I can do. And baths, for two?”

“Thank you,” Ciri breathed. 

Jaskier nodded, taking the innkeeper’s hand and bowing over it in gratitude, and went out with Ciri, and only once they were outside did he realize she was still holding his hand. Well, she must be terrified. _He_ was mildly terrified at the idea of Geralt so sick he’d be unable to tell the difference between Jaskier and a teenaged girl. 

Roach was standing wearily in the courtyard, head down and hip cocked, and Geralt was leaning against her shoulder, his own shoulders slumped. He had his eyes closed, and he looked absolutely awful, death-pale with strange blotches of pink in his cheeks, face sheened with sweat, shirt stuck to him and showing how uncharacteristically bony and gaunt he was. He was shivering, Jaskier realized in some horror as they drew closer. He’d seen a lot of things, in the years he’d known Geralt, but he was fairly certain he’d never seen the Witcher _shiver_.

“Geralt,” Ciri said, finally letting go of Jaskier’s hands to run to him. He put out an unsteady hand and caught her against his side, not opening his eyes.

“There’s no room, is there,” Geralt said, so hoarse he was nearly whispering. A shudder went through him, and he looked-- he looked so defeated, Jaskier’s guts hurt from it. 

“Jaskier is here,” Ciri said. “He says we can stay with him.”

Geralt opened his eyes, and it visibly took him a moment to focus them enough to look around. They were glassy, vacant, and his gaze passed over Jaskier without recognition, then paused, and backtracked. It would have been comical in its slowness if it wasn’t frightening. When he was finally looking at Jaskier, he paused, and opened his mouth, but then closed his mouth again, and looked-- unsure. 

“Geralt,” Jaskier said, coming closer. Geralt watched him approaching, brows pulled together in a strangely uncertain, worried expression. It quite took the wind out of any remaining anger Jaskier had, and turned it to worry. “It’s me. Come on, let’s get you inside.”

Ciri got the first bath. Geralt sat on the sole chair in the room, shoved its back flush with the wall, and within the amount of time it took for Jaskier to give Ciri directions to the room with the bath in it, Geralt went vacant-eyed and completely still. Jaskier had seen him meditate before, occasionally, and after a disconcerted moment of wondering whether the man had _died_ , he realized that’s what this was.

Jaskier occupied himself in finding somewhere to put all their baggage so that he could put a pallet into the closet for Ciri. He was going to have to share the bed with Geralt because there wasn’t room for either of them to sleep on the floor. He and Geralt had bunked together before, with much growling from Geralt on the first occasion at least and occasionally thereafter, but the Witcher had proven to be a rather good bed companion, throwing off a lot of body heat and moving very little. 

He would have gently needled Geralt about it now, but he knew from experience there was no point trying to speak to the man. So he sat on the bed and sorted through the things people had put into his lute case, unexpectedly touched by the odd little things desperate people had felt moved to give him. 

The darning wool, he was going to put to immediate good use. One of his outer jackets had gotten torn, and he’d mended it badly with white linen thread but the repair looked awful and had begun to shred, so he tucked himself up next to the lamp and set to work on it. The jacket was blue, but bottle-green would blend nicely, he thought. 

He’d just managed to get all of the white thread out of the repair when there was a knock at the door, and a young woman came in with a tray of food. Jaskier thanked her and they put it all onto the table. She was clearly unnerved by Geralt, and it wasn’t helped by Jaskier also not really being able to hide that it was unnerving _him_ that they weren’t making enough noise to disturb Geralt. The thing about Geralt meditating was that it was often a fairly fragile thing, and he’d get angry with Jaskier for talking to himself because it was often enough to disturb him. 

As she left, the young woman murmured, “Is it contagious, what he’s got?”

“Oh,” Jaskier said, startled, but it was a sensible question. “No, no. He’s--” He sighed. How to say it. “He was injured and a mage healed him and sort of. Didn’t. Get it all, I think?”

The young woman regarded him dubiously. “Is he cursed?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” Jaskier said. “I’m not sure. At least he got his daughter to safety.” 

“Oh,” the woman said, and glanced down the hall toward the bathing room. “Is that how it is.”

Ciri was just old enough, Jaskier thought grimly, that they were probably going to get that a lot. “Yes,” he said. 

“She does favor him, a bit,” the young woman said, which was either kind or uncharitable depending on your perspective. 

“They’ve both been through a lot,” Jaskier said diplomatically, and managed to get the woman out the door to go change the bathwater so Geralt could have a turn, provided Jaskier could revive him.

Ciri came in, then, in a clearly secondhand nightdress made from a large man’s shirt with the neckline crudely altered, and she saw the food and her eyes lit up. Jaskier made much of getting her settled and feeding her, and also explained to her that she was going to get to sleep in her own little space, and while he could tell she wasn’t excited that it was a closet, she did seem pleased at the thought of simultaneous privacy and safety.

Geralt, in the midst of this, startled back to awareness, and spent a distressingly long moment staring around the room as if he’d never seen any of them before and wasn’t sure whether they were friends or foes. Jaskier tried to get him to eat, but he refused anything besides water. 

Once the bath was prepared, Jaskier went down the hallway with him to show him where it was, and then went into the room with him. “How ill are you, really?” he demanded.

Geralt looked oddly fragile for a moment. “I’ll recover,” he said. 

“If,” Jaskier said. “I feel like there’s an if there.”

“If I can rest,” Geralt said. “I don’t--” He sighed. “My current ability to defend myself is somewhat lower than, say, yours, on a bad day. So yes, if the innkeeper’s elderly mother took a disliking to me and went after me with a shoe I’d likely die of it.” He made a grim little smile. “Is that what you’re looking to hear?”

“I’m not what you’d call pleased to hear it, no,” Jaskier said, “but that’s the level of honesty I’m looking for.”

Geralt considered that a moment. “Are you planning to kill me? Because this is your big chance.”

“Ha, and inherit your problems? Not bloody likely, thanks. No, I’m actually here to make sure you don’t drown in the bath.” Jaskier put his hands on his hips, and in so doing, encountered his belt purse. “Oh, and by the way, I was horrified to discover that I still have your medallion, so once you’re out of the bath I will be returning that to you directly.”

“You,” Geralt said, staring at him for a long moment. But then he looked away, and began to undress. “I spent half of today in a panic because I couldn’t find that fucking medallion.”

“Ciri mentioned you didn’t entirely seem to remember last night,” Jaskier said. 

“I don’t,” Geralt said shortly, struggling with his boots. Jaskier sighed.

“Give me that,” Jaskier said, and with rather more effort than it normally took, managed to wrestle Geralt’s boots off him. He continued the conversation doggedly, refusing to be disgusted by Geralt’s absolutely foul socks. “So that medallion. It’s not just sentimental, is it?”

“No,” Geralt said. Fortunately he seemed to be able to handle his trousers by himself. 

“I admit I had a horrified vision, for a moment, of attempting to go to-- whatever that map was supposed to lead to-- and attempting to return it and explain how I possibly came by it,” Jaskier said.

Geralt looked alarmed, pausing as he climbed into the bathtub. “Oh,” he said, “I don’t know that it would go well for you.” He shook his head. “It really would depend on who you met.” He settled himself down into the water with a half-stifled groan, then scrubbed at his face.

Already, Jaskier noted, his color had improved and his eyes were tracking better. He looked more like himself, and less like someone who might plausibly be defeated by a grandmother with a shoe. They sat in companionable enough silence for a little while, while Geralt prodded various bits of himself, clearly making sure there were no forgotten injuries.

After a time, Jaskier picked up some of the threads of what he’d been wanting to say, and began elliptically, “I also… so, last night, as I was running around the woods alone surrounded by ghouls--”

“Why did you leave?” Geralt interrupted. “That was suicide. I can’t believe you survived.” Jaskier watched his expression suddenly go blank, and laughed, knowing exactly what he was belatedly thinking.

“I’m really me,” he said, and pulled a silver coin out of his belt pouch and made much of pressing it against the back of his hand. “I wasn’t really thinking clearly when I ran off, Geralt, you’d just freaked out at me, made me take your medallion and made me stab you and told me your undead corpse was going to come after me, and then suddenly fucking Yennefer of fucking Vengeburg was there, and I had been willing to tough it out if it looked like things were going poorly, but there she was to be your hero and I thought that the last time she and you and I were all together had gone so poorly, I’d just spare myself the hassle and fuck off straightaway.”

“Hm,” Geralt said. It was the first time he’d sounded like himself during this entire encounter, Jaskier thought. 

“So, at any rate, I sort of lit out into the dark without a plan, and then thought probably I was going to die, but as it happens I kept… having these sort of… premonitions of dread. Warnings, and the like. So I’d change my course, or stop and go back, or detour around, or-- at any rate, all night long it was like I kept getting warnings of things, and probably a lot of it was luck, but.” He opened the belt pouch and finally made himself touch the thing, pulling it out and holding it in his hand. “It was this thing, wasn’t it?”

Geralt looked at him through loose hair that had fallen in his face, and nodded slowly. “That’s what it’s for,” he said. He scrubbed at his face some more, and pushed his hair back, and added, “That’s not _all_ it’s for, but that’s. Practically speaking, yes.”

“I didn’t remember that I had it,” Jaskier said. “I mean, I clearly wasn’t-- I won’t say I was wrong, but I wasn’t thinking very clearly when I left. You really don’t remember any of the part where you begged me to stab you?”

“I don’t,” Geralt said, but slowly, and he wasn’t looking at Jaskier, which generally indicated he was perhaps not telling an entire truth. God, Jaskier had spent so long learning him, _why_ \-- but, really, why not? 

“Well,” Jaskier said. “It was awful, Geralt. Don’t ever fucking ask me to do anything like that for you again.”

“I’ll try not to,” Geralt said. He rolled his head on his neck and then sank down lower in the water, trying to prop his feet up on the other edge of the bath. It wasn’t quite shaped properly, but he managed to hook one over the edge and brace himself with the other, so he sank down with his shoulders under the level of the water and his head tipped back against the side. “The whole experience wasn’t exactly fun for me either.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Jaskier said. He turned the medallion over in his fingers. “Does this-- I mean, it’s clearly functional, but besides being decorative, does it mean anything?”

“Yes,” Geralt said. 

Jaskier waited, and raised an eyebrow at Geralt, who raised an eyebrow back. “Come on,” he said. 

“I can’t tell Ciri to fuck off because she’s my daughter,” Geralt said, very clearly grumbling, “and now I can’t tell you to fuck off because I’ve horribly wronged you and then you saved my life twice in two days. This is the worst.”

“ _Is_ it the worst?” Jaskier asked, mildly satisfied. “Or would being dead with your obligation to your child surprise unfilled be worse?”

Geralt sighed, and sank down even lower in the water, managing to get his head underneath long enough to blow several bubbles before resurfacing and scrubbing his fingers through his hair, then down his face. “Fine,” he said. “You’re right. _That’s_ the worst.”

“So you were an irredeemable asshole to me when last we met, and then last night’s reunion was a fucking horrorshow,” Jaskier said. “It fucking _sucked_ , I had to flee for my life, and then you _immediately_ forgot about it because your girlfriend showed up and saved the day. I get to be mad about it and be pushy and demanding today.”

“That’s not why I forgot,” Geralt said dourly, from his nearly-submerged position. 

“Does that really matter, though?” Jaskier asked. “From my perspective?”

Geralt sighed, a long exhalation. “No,” he said, “probably not.” He was silent a moment, but Jaskier waited, knowing that wasn’t it, and after a moment he inhaled sharply and said, “I had several long conversations with you and I don’t think you were actually present for any of them, but I’m not sure.”

“We spoke briefly,” Jaskier said. “The rest of those times, it was really Ciri you were talking to, about herself.”

“That poor kid,” Geralt said, and put a hand over his eyes. “That poor fucking kid.”

“She’s going to have to be tough,” Jaskier said, then had mercy and added, “but think about it, she’s survived Calanthe all this time, compared to that you’re a fucking holiday.”

“Fair,” Geralt said. He was quiet a moment. “Calanthe’s dead, I saw her corpse.”

“Good,” Jaskier said. “Fuck. Don’t tell Ciri I said that.”

“She knows her grandmother is dead,” Geralt said. More keenly, he added, “And whatever else you may justifiably say about Calanthe, she loved her granddaughter.”

“That’s fair,” Jaskier said. Calanthe had loved her daughter disastrously and without much consideration for her daughter’s actual feelings, as he recalled, so it had likely been much the same with the next generation.

“I can’t offer her much, after that,” Geralt said, and Jaskier realized the witcher was actually _despondent_ about that.

“Geralt,” he said. “You may be an asshole with no healthy coping mechanisms or social aptitude of any kind but you’ve more moral fortitude in your little finger than Calanthe had in her whole body, so don’t beat yourself up about being an unsuitable parent. You’re just what Ciri needs after spending her tender formative years in the lap of that menace to humanity. So stop freaking out and pull yourself together and do whatever you’ve got to do so you can see straight.”

“Calanthe wasn’t a _menace_ ,” Geralt protested, and Jaskier cut him off.

“She committed genocide,” he said, “on _multiple_ occasions, and beheaded people for fun. I’m sure she had her reasons and I am very sorry about what has happened to Cintra but she was a lunatic, Geralt, and I’m getting that out of my system now so I don’t have to say it in front of your daughter. Just, know this, in your heart: Asshole or no, you’re a better person than Calanthe was, and you will do just fine by this child now that you’ve finally decided to acknowledge your destiny.”

“One of the things I thought I was telling you, but was telling Ciri,” Geralt said, and the way he was so low in the water he was sort of moodily intoning this directly to the edge of the bathtub, “was that perhaps Destiny’s plan is not for me and Ciri to be together forever, but rather for me to be a stepping-stone to the next part of her journey.”

“Well,” Jaskier said, “that’s probably horse shit, but I suppose it doesn’t hurt to prepare for it. So what? Make what time you’ve got count. First order of business is to get her to safety since surely there are people hunting for her.”

Geralt sat up out of the water a little bit, at least switching which foot was braced against the side, and shook his head slightly, but he wasn’t disagreeing. He had a faint disbelieving smile, instead. “Jaskier,” he said, “when did you get _practical_?”

“I was always practical,” Jaskier said, “I just didn’t usually bother showing you. I also always give fantastic advice, it’s just that my criteria are usually more frivolous than they are at the moment.”

Geralt sighed, stretching his shoulders. Even gaunt as he was at the moment, he did still have magnificent shoulders, and Jaskier felt no compunction about openly admiring them. “Well,” Geralt said, letting his hands drop and his shoulders slump. He was looking down into the water, and looked tired, and soft, and old, almost like a normal person his age-- well, probably not his age; Jaskier wasn’t sure how old he was but probably older than a human would live to be, so maybe like a normal person the age Geralt ought to be relative to Jaskier’s age. He sighed again. “In the last day or so I’ve attempted to apologize to you about a dozen times and I’ve no idea whether any of them were actually _to_ you, so I probably should try again. I’ve been an asshole to you for our entire acquaintance and I certainly went above and beyond, the last time.”

“And now you’re sorry, because I’m in a position to help you,” Jaskier said, crossing his arms and leaning on the edge of the tub. Geralt looked stricken, then defeated, and sank down in the water a bit, scowling in that particular manner that for years Jaskier had thought was just crankiness but had at some point figured out was a particular manifestation of the man’s own seething self-hatred. Jaskier let him stew like that for a moment and then relented. “I forgave you last night,” he said quietly, and held out a hand. “Hasty words in a moment of anger can’t really wipe out twenty years of friendship.”

Geralt looked at his hand, then up at his face, and then finally took his hand. “Did I,” he said quietly, and stopped, frowning at their conjoined hands. If he showed his age in any reasonable manner, Jaskier thought, those lines would be graven deeply in his face, but as it was you couldn’t tell when he was in repose that he scowled all the fucking time. It wasn’t fair.

“Yes,” Jaskier said, “I held your hand while the mornat was killing you. We’ve had this conversation in several fragments and I’ve had a day to get even angrier at you, but now that you’re here I find I can’t keep it up. So let’s move on.”

“I don’t deserve,” Geralt said, but let it trail off, and his scowl was rather more uncertain than normal.

“Deserving things is a level of theoretical we haven’t really got time for,” Jaskier said. “So let’s move on, as I said, and do what we can with what we have.” He shook his hand in Geralt’s a little, and added, “That water’s going cold, you’ll freeze to death if you keep marinating in there. Come on.”


	5. Only One Bed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok this story started gen and got shippy, which i hadn't expected, but I am absolutely helpless to resist the lure of the Only One Bed trope *especially* since Jaskier and I both went into this thinking that it would be no big deal.  
> So, I guess, please note story rating changing-- I went with Mature, as it's not, like, _super_ explicit, please drop me a line if you think that's the wrong call or whatever. Depends what happens in future chapters I suppose!  
> And there's no direct reference to anything dodgy or underage but both Jaskier and Geralt mention enjoying consensual same-sex shenanigans as schoolboys-- I don't know what the age of consent is in this 'verse and I'm not getting into it, just if that's something that squicks you, please do imagine the schoolboys as having been legally old enough to consent in your municipality. :)

  
  


Jaskier went back to the room while Geralt sorted himself out, having satisfied himself there weren’t any more gaping untreated wounds anywhere on the witcher’s body. Most everything was scarred over, though where the grubby bandage had been on his thigh was a horrible-looking mangled scar recently-healed and still pink. The mornat had left only a twisting white scar, Jaskier thought, and whether it was the knife that had done it or something Yennefer had done, he wasn’t sure. He didn’t want to think of it, didn’t want to have left any marks of his own.

Ciri had eaten every scrap of the food on the table and was apparently building herself a nest in the closet. “Leave some of the blankets for me, hey?” Jaskier said.

She gave him a wide-eyed look of innocence, but grudgingly pulled one back out of her hoard and handed it over. He took it. “Where’s Geralt sleeping?” she asked.

“He’ll bunk with me,” Jaskier said. “It’s not like he’d fit in this closet.”

“I don’t even think he’d fit in this closet standing up,” she said. 

“He’d have to keep the door open so there was somewhere for his other shoulder to go,” Jaskier agreed. 

“Are you both going to fit in that bed?” Ciri asked dubiously. It wasn’t a very large bed.

“We may have to stack,” Jaskier said. “But I’ve known Geralt a very long time and we have slept in some very terrible places and this is far from the worst. At least the bed is _dry_. I’ll take it.”

Ciri laughed, and then went solemn and lowered her voice. “Is he all right?”

“I think his fever has broken,” Jaskier said.

“Have you ever seen him like that before?” she asked.

Jaskier shook his head. “I don’t think that happens to him very often,” he said. “He’ll be all right, Ciri. I’m tempted to say we should stay here tomorrow, and another night, but I assume people must be looking for you. It might not be safe.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think it is,” she said. “And-- Yennefer said when I tried to reach her, others would have seen me, and while she shielded me, I don’t know how effective that was. We really shouldn’t even stop for tonight, but--”

“Geralt needs to rest,” Jaskier said. “Listen, I can see you’re sort of in a disguise, but don’t you think we could do a better job than this?” And he made a gesture, indicating her long flowing white-blonde hair. She was in clothes that looked like a peasant had given them to her, but no self-respecting peasant girl would have her hair loose like that. Loose hair took maintenance and was very much an upper-class affectation. She should at least have it braided.

She lit up, strangely. “I used to disguise myself as a boy all the time,” she said. “I could do that again.”

“That might be best,” Jaskier said. And then he lit up too. “You could be my apprentice! You did so well with the part-singing. No one would expect that.”

“That would be fun,” she said. But then her expression dimmed a little. “But are you coming with us? I thought you had somewhere you were going.”

“I could come a little ways,” Jaskier said. That was an excellent point. If Geralt was going to a Witcher stronghold in the mountains somewhere, it wasn’t like there would be much for Jaskier to do there, and they might take exception to him anyway. “At least, I think our travels run together a little while. Well, even if I don’t, I’m sure I can get you boys’ clothing.”

“I had a cap,” Ciri said. “It held my hair under it all braided and it did a fine job.”

“I could get one,” Jaskier said, tonguing thoughtfully at his teeth. “But what do we do about Geralt?”

“He told me there was no point pretending not to be what he was,” Ciri said. “I tried to get him to take an assumed name and he was very grumpy about it.”

“He’s very grumpy about almost everything,” Jaskier said. “It’s not really something you can take personally.”

“It can be hard not to,” she said. 

“Oh, don’t I know that one,” Jaskier said.

There was a thump, and a bump, and then Geralt came in the door, with an armload of his dirty clothes, wearing nothing but an oversized clean shirt. Jaskier let himself take a moment to admire the man’s thighs, which recent misadventures had done nothing to really change the shape of, much. Geralt dumped his gear on the floor and pushed it into a pile with his foot, then leaned back against the closed door with a sigh. 

“You look better,” Jaskier said, not meaning the thighs but not _not_ meaning them, either. The day he didn’t idly ogle or hit on Geralt was the day they put him in the ground because he’d been dead a day already. Geralt’s color was improved, and his hair was starting to dry already. 

“I feel a lot better,” Geralt said. He sat down in the chair. “I see you’ve figured out where you’re sleeping, Ciri.”

“Catch,” Jaskier said, pulling the medallion out of his pouch and tossing it.

Geralt’s attention snapped up and he caught it easily, looking mildly offended. “Don’t throw things at me,” he said.

“You’re definitely better,” Jaskier said. “Listen, you two settle in and I’m going back down to play a while longer. I’m bunking with you, Geralt, so don’t hog the blankets.”

Geralt looked at the tiny bed, looked at Jaskier, and quirked his mouth wryly to one side. “I see,” he said. “Well, if I don’t move over, you’ll have to wake me up.”

“Don’t punch me if I wake you up,” Jaskier said.

He came back a couple of hours later with a full set of boy’s clothes for Ciri, including a cap, and a loaf of bread, a sausage, and some cheese for Geralt if he woke up hungry, and assorted other provisions for their upcoming journey. He still wasn’t sure he was going with them, but if Geralt was turning over a new leaf of being reasonable, well. Jaskier was a fool, and a sucker, and what more was there to life than that?

He piled his spoils onto the table-- if Geralt had his normal amount of gear, there was no possible way they’d even be able to fit into this tiny room, but with no armor, only one sword in a scabbard that didn’t match it, and about half the usual number of saddlebags, the pile mostly fit under the table-- and set about undressing for bed. He didn’t have to be shy; Ciri had the door of her little closet pulled shut. 

Geralt was breathing slow and steady, deeply asleep. Normally Jaskier coming in late and reeking of booze would wake him, but it didn’t seem to be doing the trick just now. Jaskier stripped down to his shirt and stood at the foot of the bed, contemplating which side to crawl in on. Geralt was on his front, feet hanging off the edge, one arm overhanging the side, so Jaskier decided to crawl in on the side where his arm wasn’t.

He nudged him over, and Geralt sighed and rolled away a little, onto his side. Hm. Well, nothing for it; Jaskier crawled in and made a space for himself in front of Geralt, where the witcher had made a tiny sliver of room. 

As soon as he got himself under the blankets, Geralt slung an arm across him without seeming to wake, and his breathing slid back into deep regularity.

They’d bunked together several times, and had even more or less cuddled in some extreme cold a time or two, but this was outright spooning. Jaskier wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

He wasn’t drunk enough to accept it without question; he’d only had a few cups of ale while he was playing, not enough to justify any careless decisions. He tried to wriggle a little bit of distance between them, but after a brief moment of this, Geralt sighed, stretched, and wrapped his arm even tighter around him, pulling him back closer. 

It wasn’t-- it wasn’t that he didn’t want Geralt to hold him, he just didn’t-- well it was _confusing_ , was what it was. Geralt’s body was so big and warm, and his arm was heavy and well-muscled, and his-- ok that was definitely his dick, against Jaskier’s ass, and it wasn’t exactly hard, but it was absolutely without question his dick. 

He wriggled away again, but Geralt was still holding tightly. He couldn’t get any distance. Geralt was so strong, was the thing, and so solid-- nngh, _shit_ , Jaskier was getting turned on now. Fuck.

“Quit squirming,” Geralt mumbled into the back of his neck.

“Then let go of me,” Jaskier hissed back.

Geralt squeezed tighter, hauling him back more firmly into his grip, and then shoved a leg over his, pinning Jaskier down easily. Oh _fuck_ that was hot, and Jaskier squeaked in protest, pinioned helplessly. 

Geralt rolled a little more on top of him, and then put his face against the back of Jaskier’s neck and-- fucking _bit_ him, not hard but enough that it was undeniably a bite. _Fuck_ , that was _incredibly_ hot, and Jaskier’s noise of protest turned into a desperate whimper. Of fucking course he’d thought of this before, he’d been attracted to Geralt more or less from the first time he’d noticed him, but it had been decades and there had been chances and Geralt had been placidly and steadfastly unresponsive. 

“I’ll teach you to wriggle like that,” Geralt murmured into the back of his neck. Maybe this wasn’t-- seduction, maybe Geralt was just teasing him. Jaskier wasn’t even sure the man was awake. But then Geralt pinned him a little more securely with his hip, and-- that was absolutely Geralt’s dick and it was definitely not in the same state it had been in the previous moment. No, this was not a playful innocent sort of thing, that was undeniably an erection. 

“Geralt,” Jaskier said. “Uhhh I’m flattered and not disinterested but we should probably talk about this.”

Geralt mumbled something unintelligible and slid his hand down, working it under Jaskier’s body to grab his dick where it was pinned against the mattress. Jaskier made a strangled noise and completely failed to even attempt to resist thrusting into the far-too-welcome pressure, as Geralt started moving his hand, but he managed to get his own hand free and grabbed Geralt’s arm. “Geralt,” he said, “this is fantastic, but I really--”

Geralt grumbled, then pulled his face away from Jaskier’s neck and looked over his shoulder. “You’re not-- fuck,” he said blearily, and let go of Jaskier’s dick. “Fuck. Shit. Sorry.” But he didn’t really back off, so Jaskier couldn’t roll over and look at him. “I didn’t--”

“I don’t _mind_ ,” Jaskier said, trying not to sound disappointed. Geralt obviously had mistaken him for someone else, which was just typical, but-- there was no way Geralt had thought he was a woman, which was completely new information to Jaskier regarding things Geralt was and was not interested in doing. “But I had a feeling that since that’s not something you’ve done to me before, you were mistaken about who I was.”

“Mm,” Geralt said, and put his face back in the back of Jaskier’s neck. He was still for a moment, then nuzzled at the base of Jaskier’s skull, his breath tickling across Jaskier’s hair like he was _scenting_ him. “Well. Do you want to?”

“Fuck,” Jaskier said, “I mean, yes, but--”

Geralt had put his arm back across Jaskier’s body, but paused. “ _Yes but_ isn’t a yes,” he said.

“Why now?” Jaskier asked. “No interest for years, and suddenly now?”

“Not no interest,” Geralt said, and bit his neck again. “But I didn’t think it was a good idea, before.”

“Now it is?” Jaskier asked, and it came out a bit strangled; Geralt was licking over the marks he’d just made with his teeth.

“If you say yes, it is,” Geralt said. 

“Does near death make you horny or something?” Jaskier asked.

“No,” Geralt said. And-- just a little, but just enough to be undeniable-- he ground his erection against Jaskier’s thigh right where it met his ass. 

Jaskier was helpless to resist tipping his head back and making a high-pitched, hungry little noise. “Fuck,” he said. 

“ _Fuck_ isn’t a yes,” Geralt said, and bit his neck right where it met his shoulder. 

“Oh God,” Jaskier said. “I hate myself that I’m even asking but I need to know why it’s a good idea now when it wasn’t before.”

Geralt sighed, and then bit him again, harder, and Jaskier whimpered, tipping his head back and giving Geralt his throat. Geralt growled, but it was just a slightly richer flavor of growl, really; then he inhaled, and said, “Dunno why, just seems like a better idea now than it did before.”

It had a ring of truth, and Jaskier thought, through the haze of lust, that maybe this once Geralt wasn’t just being taciturn to be an ass; maybe he really couldn’t explain it. “Fuck,” Jaskier said, “that’s good enough for me.”

“That a yes?” Geralt breathed in his ear.

“Yes,” Jaskier said.

Geralt grabbed Jaskier’s dick again with no hesitation. “Then we should probably turn over,” he said, “because I think most of my body fluids are so full of poison I’d burn a hole in your skin if I finish this way.”

“What,” Jaskier said, but he was too lust-addled to really be alarmed. The pressure of Geralt’s thigh and pelvis on his eased and he scrambled to turn himself around. 

Geralt took him by the jaw and kissed him, then, surprisingly tenderly at first, but then deepening to something more expectedly-savage. He tasted of birch, which he’d probably used twigs of to clean his teeth. Jaskier should have done the same but hadn’t; he knew he tasted of beer. Geralt didn’t seem to mind. 

He was breathless and shockingly hard by the time Geralt released him and let out a soft laugh as he turned himself over, guiding Jaskier into the position he wanted. 

“Ah,” Jaskier said, “the schoolboy special, the Oxenfurt rub. Used to do this all the time in my school days.” More often facing one another but this was pleasant too, and easier in the tiny bed.

“Me too,” Geralt said, getting Jaskier’s dick slotted nice and snug between his thighs. It was less involved than going into anyone’s body, but astonishingly pleasant both to give and to take. 

“You went to school?” Jaskier asked, surprised.

Geralt looked back over his shoulder, and Jaskier couldn’t see much in the fairly-profound darkness, but he could identify from the little huff of breath that Geralt was laughing at him. “Where’d you think I learned to be a Witcher? In a cave? Alone in the forest?”

“There’s a  _ school _ ?” Jaskier asked, as he spat on his hand to get things lined up nicely with no chafing. Geralt’s ass was fucking glorious, taut and muscular and generously curved, with a beautifully-defined crease at the tops of his thighs. He’d admired it visually on many previous occasions but exploration by touch was a vastly superior experience.

“Only you,” Geralt said, and let out a little groan as Jaskier started moving both his dick and his hand on Geralt’s dick, “could  _ talk _ at a time like--  _ yes _ there’s a school. Teach you to read and write and cast cantrips, turn you into a fucking mutant, nngh,  _ fuck _ , yes, sometimes us students got up to nonsense like--  _ ha _ , this when left to ourselves,  _ nngh _ \--”

“Okay but you’re the one talking through this,” Jaskier said in Geralt’s ear, gratified that Geralt was more out of breath than he was. He put his mouth on Geralt’s shoulder and got the arm on his lower side wrapped underneath to spread his hand across Geralt’s solid belly. Geralt had clearly expected to be handling his own erection, and kept touching Jaskier’s arm distractedly, but Jaskier had his hand firmly wrapped around Geralt’s cock and was working it as skillfully as he’d ever handled one, to apparent great effect. Geralt had his thighs clenched tight and clearly had some practice at this and Jaskier was doing his damnedest to stay distracted so he didn’t embarrass himself. 

“You’re impossible,” Geralt said, and he sounded fond. “Ah fuck. You’re good at this too. I thought you would be.”

“You thought,” Jaskier said, boggling at the idea that Geralt had _thought about this_. Geralt hadn’t had _no_ interest and he’d thought about it including specifically what Jaskier was going to be like in bed and had thought it was a bad idea until suddenly now he didn’t anymore. That was as far as Jaskier could really think, though, no matter how much he was trying not to focus on how hot and tight Geralt’s thighs were around his cock and how fucking good it felt to just fuck into and against him like that.

“How the fuck could I avoid noticing your sex life,” Geralt said, and his voice had gone thin and shaky. “Ah fuck, Jaskier, yes-- that’s-- fuck!”

He was close, he was palpably so close, head thrown back against Jaskier’s shoulder, breath fast and hard, hand clamped down around Jaskier’s forearm but not too hard, back arching a little-- he was so fucking _pretty_ , but Jaskier knew goddamned well he wouldn’t want to hear that. “Come on, Geralt,” Jaskier said, low and fond, thinking of his Witcher’s fragile feelings. “That’s so good. Just let go, I’ve got you.”

“Fuck,” Geralt said unsteadily, breathing hard, and Jaskier figured a man who bit probably liked getting bitten, so he set his teeth carefully at the junction of the muscle and the tendon at the side of Geralt’s neck, avoiding the scar tissue he could feel there, and bit down, soft at first and then harder. Geralt made a high desperate little noise and came, shuddering violently in Jaskier’s grip. 

“Nicely, nicely,” Jaskier murmured distractedly into Geralt’s neck, managing to keep control. Geralt’s grip tightened on his arm.

“Don’t get any on you,” he said blurrily, pulling Jaskier’s hand away from his cock and taking it between both of his hands, wiping it off. There was a strange, sharp scent, but Jaskier was far, far too distracted to pay it much attention. Geralt was still trembling a little, and Jaskier took his freed hand and grabbed the witcher’s hip to pull him back a little more firmly-- he was so close, he was-- fuck-- 

“Geralt,” Jaskier said unsteadily, meaning to ask if he should do something else, but Geralt made a satisfied-sounding growl and shoved back against him, and Jaskier shuddered over the edge into a fairly profound orgasm.

He came to himself on his back, and Geralt was moving around, apparently cleaning up. 

“Geralt,” Jaskier managed to say again.

Geralt settled himself back in the bed, and lay down, throwing an arm over Jaskier again and pulling him in close. “This doesn’t have to be a whole thing, does it?” he asked.

“That depends on what you mean by _a whole thing_ ,” Jaskier said, heart sinking a little. But he could pretend it hadn’t happened, if that was how this had to go. He just might revisit his semi-idle thought of traveling with them much longer. 

Obviously, things between him and Geralt would have to change, because things between them had been nonexistent most recently, and also now Geralt was going to have to rearrange his own life what with having a daughter and all, and maybe for him that was just a short disruption but Jaskier was getting somewhat beyond the need for spending his whole life on the lam anyway, and ten years or however long this kid was going to need minding was going to be enough to put Jaskier squarely into retirement territory. 

“I just mean,” Geralt said, “you don’t need to write a ballad about my thighs.”

“Never,” Jaskier said, and laughed. “Oh, no, never. I’ll keep those to myself. If I do mention them in a ballad it won’t be by name. Or a poem; you’ll be anonymous, no fear.”

“Don’t,” Geralt growled, but it was clear he was also amused. Jaskier supposed he’d already known that a fantastic way to make Geralt less grumpy was to give him an orgasm, it just wasn’t something he’d ever had directly under his own purview before.

“Lucky for you,” Jaskier said, “I’m too tired to tease you with any rhymes about taut alabaster pillars or whatever.” 

“Or whatever,” Geralt said. He sighed, settling down, pulling Jaskier even closer against him, and to Jaskier’s surprise he raised his hand and caught Jaskier’s jaw to pull his face over to kiss him, again surprisingly tenderly. “Are you really that astonished?” Geralt asked. 

“Yes,” Jaskier said. 

“But you trust me,” Geralt said.

“Well, yes,” Jaskier said. “If you were doing this to be an asshole you wouldn’t have taken it _that_ far.”

Geralt found himself a resting spot with his face tucked against Jaskier’s shoulder, and sighed, gustily. “Been trying to push you away this whole time,” he said, very quietly. “Succeeded, for a while. Saw what that was like. Now I have to admit I need people. Figures you’re first on the list. And if I’m not trying to push you away then why try to push you away?”

“Why not lure me in with your firm, supple asscheeks?” Jaskier said lightly. “What little sense of self-preservation I have is absolutely no match for thighs like that.”

“Well,” Geralt said. “I don’t have much to offer the world, but one thing they teach you in Witcher school is to press any advantage you find yourself with.”

“So you _are_ using me,” Jaskier said.

“No,” Geralt said, “but I will if you want.” He laughed, another soft huff of breath with no noise behind it, and then his voice sank to almost a growl. “Actually what I’ve been wanting to do for years is to pin you down and fuck you so hard and so good you forget how to talk.” He laughed again, and then continued in a slightly less husky tone, “But I figure that’s the kind of thing that it probably takes a couple of attempts to get the desired result so if I poisoned you on the first try I’d never get what I wanted, plus you’d be dead and I don’t want that, so.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Jaskier said, almost dazed with the force of that much arousal hitting him that fast. He recovered quickly enough to say, “It’s actually really hard to get me past words. I’m really verbal.”

“I know,” Geralt said. “I like a challenge.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Jaskier said. If he were twenty he’d be ready to go again. As it was, his body was thinking about it.

“Probably going to take me at least two days to burn through all these toxins, though, enough for it to be safe for you,” Geralt said. “And, y’know. The kid probably shouldn’t witness that, so opportunities are kind of limited.”

“So you’re telling me I’ll just have to come with you to wherever it is you’re trying to go,” Jaskier said. 

“Did you have somewhere better you were trying to get to?” Geralt asked.

“I was going to go to Oxenfurt, if you must know,” Jaskier said.

“Hm,” Geralt said. 

“You gave me a map of a place you were trying to get to,” Jaskier said. “I feel like we’re going a kind of ass-backward way to get there, unless I’m reading it wrong?”

“I gave it to _you_ ,” Geralt said, and exhaled deeply, pressing his forehead against Jaskier’s shoulder. “I could remember drawing the map, and there’s-- the way in’s a secret, people shouldn’t know about it-- and then I thought I gave it to Ciri and she didn’t know what I was talking about, and then I--” He trailed off. “I was in a bad way, today.”

“You were,” Jaskier said, and his heart twisted, thinking about Geralt shivering in the forest with unfocused eyes and ghouls closing in around him. Geralt smoothed his hand across Jaskier’s chest, then tucked it down under his hip again. It was the only way to be comfortable in this bed; Jaskier was almost falling off the edge of it but Geralt’s arm was keeping him cozily braced within the cocoon of warmth provided by the scant bedding. “You’re welcome,” Jaskier said, to be an ass.

Geralt laughed, and kissed his shoulder, which was _bizarre_ and also fantastic. “Thank you,” he said. 

“I like the new Geralt,” Jaskier said. “Wait, did I do a silver test on you?”

“The medallion’s silver,” Geralt pointed out. “I like to think a doppel would’ve just gone ahead and fucked you the way I wanted to, though, for the record. They get all your surface stuff and I don’t think the schoolboy stuff’s in that layer. So you can consider your ability to comfortably ride tomorrow a proof of my actual identity.”

“For a heroic monster slayer you’re not really very reassuring company,” Jaskier said.

“If I’ve ever reassured you,” Geralt said, “you can be confident I did it by accident. I’m not reassuring.”

“Parenthood is _perfect_ for you,” Jaskier said. 

  
  
  



	6. Between The Teeth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jaskier's not getting off that easy.
> 
> listen I'm just doing whatever I want with the mechanics of Geralt's little spells with his hands, that's just how it goes, sorry

Geralt was a fucking idiot.

In the top ten ranking of his many, many,  _ many _ flaws, his inability to keep his dick out of his decision-making process was fairly high on the list, but until this point he’d largely managed to confine its disastrous influence to women. Of course he’d noticed almost right away that the bard was a swishy little piece of adorable sass with a pert ass and an eminently fuckable mouth, and he’d whiled away a bored night here and there thinking of shutting him up in various effective ways (fucking him until he lost the power of speech was one of them, but the simpler expedient of just stuffing his mouth with cock was a perennial favorite), but he’d always been able to think straight enough to avoid letting on in the man’s presence, because really, one didn’t fuck one’s bard, it was a cliche for a reason and one best avoided. Also, Jaskier was just about the only human who’d ever actually sought out Geralt’s company on any kind of ongoing sort of basis, and while Geralt hadn’t really known how to feel about it, he hadn’t wanted to fuck it up either. 

It had gotten more difficult, as the bard was decreasingly a sweet young disaster twink and increasingly a canny, clear-eyed, good-hearted person. It wasn’t that Geralt hadn’t noticed that humans aged, or had forgotten what it meant, but he’d generally not known a single human long enough to make an observation of it like this. It would be wrong to say that Jaskier had mellowed, but he’d improved his ability to read a room enormously since Geralt had first known him, and while his flair for the dramatic had not disappeared, he’d gotten a little better at not doing things for attention without considering the ramifications.

Geralt knew that humans were considered more beautiful when they were younger, but Jaskier had not particularly declined. He’d grown into himself, tended to make slightly more practical fashion choices (at least, better footwear), and had lost some of the reedy fragility that had kept Geralt from ever genuinely considering acting on any of his inclinations. 

Now Jaskier looked like he could actually take the kind of fucking Geralt wanted to give him. But the important thing really was, as Geralt had been mulling over ever since Jaskier had asked him why, was that he could believe now that Jaskier wouldn’t just do whatever Geralt wanted in bed for the sake of telling the story afterward. 

But how do you tell someone that you finally think they have enough common sense not to hurt themselves? There wasn’t a sexy way of explaining that. 

The _ other _ other reason, in this messy constellation of reasons, was that Geralt  _ had _ already fucked things up beyond repair with Jaskier, and if that hadn’t actually taken, then fucking him couldn’t make it any worse.

Still, it had been a stupid risk to take, seducing Jaskier like that. Geralt had initiated it partly in his sleep, disoriented enough that he’d forgotten where he was and with whom. He’d mentally regressed to being young and sharing a bed with Eskel and teasing him in their usual way, and then Jaskier’s scent had gone so aroused he’d escalated on pure instinct; by the time he was really awake, he’d already had his hand around Jaskier’s dick. But he’d made a snap decision not to back off, and had been rewarded for it, and the more richly rewarded because of how clearly Jaskier had weighed the pros and cons before giving in. 

Didn’t mean it hadn’t been stupid. Didn’t mean Geralt wasn’t an idiot. But it had worked out, in the moment. 

And Geralt had managed not to poison anyone, so far, with any of the toxins his body was expelling, and it was arguably a good idea to shed as many kinds of bodily fluids as he could manage to, just to rid himself of the toxic buildup that much faster.

The other evidence of Geralt’s idiocy was staring at him across the breakfast table this morning, in the form of Jaskier and Ciri dressed up as a bard and his young male apprentice, both looking unutterably smug and far, far too united in purpose. The innkeeper’s daughter was giving them sympathetic looks; apparently Jaskier had collected the set of boys’ clothes from last night’s assemblage by telling everyone that he was afraid for his young companion’s virtue in the current chaos, and they’d decided that disguising her as a boy was the best way to prevent anyone trying anything, and Geralt was trying not to grit his teeth at how clearly everyone in the inn was judging him an unworthy protector. And Jaskier, of course, was just basking in his own cleverness, as he ever did, while Ciri looked amused and smug.

But Geralt also had new socks and an actual jacket to wear, and to complain about the fact that the jacket was dark brown undyed wool and in no way copacetic with his normal taste in garb would be more ungrateful than even Geralt could bring himself to be.

They were trying to disguise that he was a Witcher, he knew it, and he knew it was futile and beyond that, counterproductive. But him saying so wasn’t going to convince them. They’d have to see it, have to see what happened when your friendly salt-of-the-earth type villager noticed the eerie eyes and put two and two together and got mad about the attempted deception. It was better to just scare people on first glance than risk them feeling you were trying to put one over on them. There was always violent backlash for that sort of thing, and Geralt had decades of bitter experience to prove it.

Disguising Ciri was a brilliant idea, however, and Geralt wasn’t going to object to his own costume change until his new nightmare team-up had enough time to bask in their own genius over that. He already could tell there was no point trying to resist them; he was just going to have to try to direct the tide rather than trying to turn it.

“It’s not going to work if you do scaryface at every single person who looks at you,” Jaskier said. Geralt looked at him over his bowl, making what he thought was pretty clearly a quizzical expression. “Like that!” Jaskier said. “That face!”

“This is the face I make when I’m eating oatmeal,” Geralt said, flattening his expression as best he could. Then he glowered. “This is the face I make when someone bothers me when I’m eating oatmeal.” Ciri laughed, a beautiful sound. 

“Ah but  _ that’s _ the face we need,” Jaskier said, and Geralt realized his expression had shifted at the sound of Ciri’s laugh. That was inconvenient and awkward and he was going to have to work on that. 

“Can’t make that face on command,” Geralt said, making himself go flat again. He used to be so good at maintaining that face. 

Jaskier propped his chin on his fist, elbow on the table. “We’ll have to work on it,” he said. “It’s a very fetching expression.”

“Someone told me Witchers don’t have emotions,” Ciri said. “But that can’t be true, Geralt, I’ve seen you have more emotions than almost anyone else I know.”

Jaskier started laughing, and wouldn’t stop, and Geralt glowered at him, then gave up and looked at Ciri. “Hm,” he said.

Jaskier wiped his eyes as he tried to recover himself. “Out of the mouths of babes,” he said. “ _ More emotions than almost anyone else I know _ , I’m going to put that right into a ballad or a poem or something. I know I can get it to scan, give me time.”

“Do you write poems as well?” Ciri asked, interested. 

“I do,” Jaskier said. And Geralt had known that, but he’d never really thought about it.

“Do you recite them, or what do you do with them?” Ciri asked.

“Ah,” Jaskier said, “poetry recitations are lovely, and all, but you know, you make a lot more money printing them in books, so that’s largely what I do with them.”

“Books,” Geralt said.

“Mm,” Jaskier said. “You know, the flat things with all the pages?”

“Fuck you,” Geralt said in mock-disgust, and pushed away from the table. 

It was eerie, but he had no memory of this room from the day before, and precious little recollection of arriving here. Nothing was really clear until he’d come out of meditation in that little room, with Jaskier sitting there frowning at him. He’d been mostly lucid since then, and the fever was gone and the shakes eased. 

He wasn’t healed yet, but he was out of the woods, figuratively speaking. They were in a lot better shape to travel, today. He wasn’t in anything like monster-fighting shape, however, and if he were on his own he’d stay holed up in this inn for a couple more days, and try to source some potion ingredients somewhere in town, maybe do a little light foraging for components. He was flat out now, except the solitary healing potion he had left, and he didn’t fancy his chances with it until his liver and kidneys had another week to regenerate, at least. 

He needed to write up some notes for himself for the next time he had a chance to stock up. At least the book of his notes hadn’t gotten lost along with most of his baggage, in all the chaos. But he needed to record the sequence of potions he’d taken, and their cumulative effects, while he could still remember.

It was a nice feeling, to realize he could leave Ciri with Jaskier and go and prepare their horses without worrying whether she’d get into some trouble or get frightened. He knew she was likely far less timid than she’d seemed ever since finding him, but she’d been badly traumatized and his progressive incapacitation almost the entire duration of their acquaintance hadn’t helped. Jaskier would be good for her, for as long as they could keep him with them.

It was kind of a relief to realize that: he’d made his snap decision last night because he needed Jaskier for Ciri’s sake, but anything he could do to make the bard want to stay with them was a good idea. Yes, that was it. 

Geralt found himself almost cheerful as he saddled the horses. Jaskier had a lovely mild-mannered palfrey, steady and easygoing and sweet-natured. Roach tried to bite her, and Geralt had to punch her in the neck and speak sternly with her about it. This made Roach try to bite  _ him _ , but the remedy for that was to stand and look disappointed in her, which didn’t really faze her but was entertaining. 

His good mood lasted through their disembarkation, even through the hat Jaskier forced over his head. It was ugly and degrading but Geralt wasn’t in a mood to make a fuss, so he just accepted it. Jaskier rode with most of the luggage, Geralt rode with Ciri tucked up behind him, and Jaskier and Ciri chattered happily for most of the time. They were talking about poetry now, for some reason, and Geralt tuned them out. It stood to reason Jaskier’s egghead stuff resonated with Ciri, who’d naturally had the finest tutors money could buy. Geralt had sort of carefully avoided knowing too much about Jaskier’s life when he wasn’t on the road, because that was the sort of thing that could lead to dangerous entanglement, but he knew the kid was university-educated and was probably a disgraced scion of nobility of some kind, though he’d avoided knowing any details. 

After a while, Ciri poked Geralt in the ribs. “Are you even listening?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Why would I eavesdrop on a conversation I’m not part of?”

“You’re part of the conversation!” she said. 

“No I’m not,” he said. “I’ve got nothing to contribute, I don’t know anything about poetry.”

“That’s what I was asking,” Ciri said. “Jaskier says you told him you went to a special Witcher school, and I asked if they study any poetry there.”

“No,” Geralt said. 

There was the usual beat, where everyone waited for him to go on, and he didn’t, and then Ciri poked him in the ribs again. “Well,” she said, “what did you study?”

“I already told Jaskier what we studied,” he said. As he recalled, Jaskier had been fucking his thighs really intently at the time and he hadn’t expected the man to remember even as many details of the conversation as he’d summoned forth thusfar, but it stood to reason, if anyone could dredge up something you’d said once, it would be the bard.

Jaskier had the grace to blush very slightly. “It was a rather profanity-laced sentence,” he said, recovering quickly, “so I missed some of the finer points. Cantrips, I recall. What’s a cantrip?”

“Hm,” Geralt said, and weighed his generally-depleted state against his desire to test out his capabilities. “This,” he said, and cast a smallish  _ Aard _ to knock a branch off a tree they were passing. To his satisfaction, it responded as intended, which meant he was as recovered as he’d thought. Now, of course, he’d have to recover from casting it, but that was a small enough matter; the important thing was that he could. 

Ciri shrieked, Jaskier’s mild-mannered horse shied, and Roach flicked her ears at him and snorted in mild annoyance. 

“What?” Geralt said, twisting around to look at Ciri. Jaskier had managed to master his horse, and was making flustered noises. “That’s a cantrip. Don’t ask if you don’t want to know.”

“Do you just memorize those, or,” Jaskier said.

“If that was it, anyone could do it,” Geralt said. “Jaskier, you’ve known me twenty years and you’ve never noticed how I light campfires?”

“Hey, I  _ did _ ask you, that time in the mountains,” Jaskier said, aggrieved, “and you told me to fuck off and that you were going to set  _ me _ on fire.”

“Oh right,” Geralt said, unable to muster much real chagrin. “I suppose I can’t blame you for being incurious after that.”

“So you’re a mage?” Ciri asked, leaning against him. 

“No,” Geralt said. “Cantrips aren’t really spells. I mean, I suppose these aren’t really cantrips either. We call them  _ signs _ because they’re really just focused around a symbol. They’re very limited and you don’t build them, like you do a spell-- they’re just rote things, and you can vary the power by making the sign bigger or smaller, but not really tweak them beyond that. Witchers don’t generally have mage abilities.”

“So anyone  _ could _ cast a cantrip,” Jaskier said. 

“Not a human,” Geralt said. “They don’t start teaching them in Witcher school until you’ve gone through a couple of rounds of mutagens.” He gave Jaskier a toothy, deliberately-unsettling grin. “By then most of the weak have died.”

“Sounds like a fun school,” Jaskier said. “Did you get any lessons in, say, theory, or literature?”

“Sure,” Geralt said. “We had to memorize and analyze a lot of literature.”

“Classics?” Ciri asked. “Epics?”

“Mostly,” Geralt said, “monster manuals.”

“Monster... manuals,” Jaskier echoed.

“There are a number of published volumes we studied,” Geralt said, “but much of it contains information previous Witchers have collected on the Path and brought back to add.”

Jaskier was staring at him, wide-eyed. “That sounds  _ fascinating _ ,” he said.

Geralt shrugged. “It is,” he said. “Though, really, it’s not written to entertain, so it can be a bit dry. Still.”

“There’s more to Witchering than just looking really cool with two swords,” Jaskier said. 

“I’m not just a, what was it, supple ass,” Geralt said. “We also had pretty intensive courses in herbalism and brewing of potions and alchemy and such.”

“Kind of a focused field of applied botany,” Jaskier suggested. 

Geralt pointed at him without looking. “ _ Very _ applied,” he said. “We were light on theoreticals.”

“Most of my education has consisted of writing analytical essays on things,” Jaskier said. 

“Most of my education was rote memorization,” Ciri said glumly.

“Well,” Geralt said. “Then we can look on the bright side, because pretty much the only thing I can offer you is an excellent practical education.”

“When did you learn how to, you know, swordfight?” Jaskier asked.

“That was most of it,” Geralt said. “Most of what we did was endless fighting practice and study and drills and sparring and that sort of nonsense. I mean, it’s stood me in good stead, but it was an awful lot of hitting things and getting hit.”

“I got hit a lot at school,” Jaskier said, “but they never let me hit anyone back.”

Geralt turned to frown at him. “Who hit you?”

“The teachers,” Jaskier said. “Always. It was like they felt they could physically beat the knowledge into you.”

Ciri gasped. “I can’t imagine what would have happened to my tutors if they’d  _ hit _ me,” she said. 

“Hm,” Geralt said, and shook his head, which reminded him he had a stupid hat on. He was angry, for some reason, thinking about Jaskier being hit as a child. But it hurt too much to think about his tutors too much, to think about-- He shook his head again. “Mostly it was the other students hitting me but the teachers did sometimes too. For my own good. At least nobody got beat to death.”

“There’s a bright side,” Jaskier said. “None of my classmates died either.”

“I didn’t say  _ that _ ,” Geralt said. “ _ Most _ of my classmates died. But not from beatings.”

“Most,” Ciri echoed blankly.

“Most humans don’t survive the mutagens,” Geralt said. 

“Most,” it was Jaskier’s turn to say.

“My group had seven boys in it, and three of us survived,” Geralt said. “The previous year, there had been twelve, and nine had survived. The next, there were four and none survived. I’m told the usual average, over the years, is three in ten.”

“Boys,” Jaskier said quietly, and Geralt knew what he was asking.

“Traditionally you start training at seven, or so,” Geralt said. “The trial that kills most of us is around twelve.”

Jaskier nodded to himself, and, as ever too quick on the uptake, said, “Traditionally. But when did you start?”

Geralt considered not answering, but he was raw about it; he still didn’t know if it was really his mother who had healed him of the ghoul bite, or if she’d been, as she said, just a dream. “Three,” he said. “I mean, it wasn’t-- I didn’t start swordfighting then.”

Ciri’s hands clutched tightly at his belt, and Jaskier just looked away. 

“Why?” Ciri whispered, finally. “Why so young? Didn’t your parents--”

Geralt shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. 

“But that’s awful,” Ciri said.

Geralt shrugged. “It was a hundred years ago,” he said. He didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It wasn’t just him, it was all of it; it was all gone now, all but a few remnants, and. It felt bad to think about, and he wanted to push it away.

“I assume that’s a poetic exaggeration,” Jaskier said. 

“No,” Geralt said. “I never studied poetry.”

Jaskier might have had a clever reply to that but Geralt raised a hand to silence him, suddenly focusing intently on the road ahead of them-- he’d heard a sound, something moving-- 

Jaskier shut up, but Ciri said, frightened and urgent, “What is it?”

She wasn’t loud enough to prevent Geralt from triangulating the sound. The undergrowth by the right side of the path, just near the turn ahead, someone was standing in it and was holding far too still after having scrambled into position. He pulled Roach to a halt, and Jaskier stopped just behind him, automatically moving himself far enough away that Geralt had room to maneuver. 

There was a long, silent moment, and finally Geralt said, “I know you’re there, kid, I’m a Witcher. I can smell you.” Unwashed, frightened, young, male, and nobody was doing his laundry. Fresh glue on arrow fletching, scent of blood-- but not human blood, likely. Rabbit or something, a carcass, recent and gutted.

Behind him, Ciri’s scent was all fear, too. 

“I’m not here to fuck around,” Geralt said. 

The rabbit hunter was frozen in the brush but there were sounds up around the corner. Not alone, then. Geralt lifted his head and scented the air currents like a hound, making none of his usual attempts not to look like that was what he was doing. (For some reason, of all the things Witchers could do, the scent-hunting unnerved humans the most.)

The wind wasn’t favorable, at their backs, so all he got was Jaskier, who didn’t smell particularly frightened, and a fox den some distance away. But he didn’t need scent to know there were men around the corner waiting to ambush them.

Geralt pulled his sword from the sheath on Roach’s shoulder, and said, “I told you, I’m not here to fuck around. I can hear at least three people around that corner.” He rode toward where the man was hiding in the bushes. “Call off your friends or I’ll cut you down where you stand.”

The archer broke and ran, tearing through the undergrowth and running directly toward where the rest of the bandits must be hiding, his flight cutting off the curve of the corner of the road to go up over a ridge the road was avoiding. “He’s got a sword,” the archer cried, and someone answered him, indistinct.

Geralt pulled Roach up; he’d’ve caught him if he weren’t unwilling to ride that hard with Ciri holding his waist. 

“What do we do,” Ciri said quietly. She wasn’t as frightened; she thought Geralt had a plan.

“We go find out how badly they want to fight,” Geralt said, but he wasn’t sure. He glanced over at Jaskier. Would it be safer to try to get Ciri onto the horse with Jaskier, freeing Geralt to fight? Did they have time for that? Should they retreat?

“I think she’s safer with you,” Jaskier said, as if he could hear thoughts. “They’re going to go for the horse with the baggage, and that’s me.” It was true; the palfrey was visibly the more laden animal. 

Geralt growled, annoyed. “I hate fighting humans,” he said. “Then we’d better stick close, hadn’t we.” He didn’t actually have a great deal of experience with this kind of bandits, the ragged desperate ones; most of those would see his armor and pair of swords and just avoid him. That was another reason not to attempt disguises, and probably the most profound of them. 

“Probably,” Jaskier said. He looked uneasy, but he still didn’t smell frightened.

Geralt sighed. “Stay to my left, then,” he said. “And Ciri, hold on.” He thought about trying to cast a shield sign but he couldn’t possibly extend it far enough to include Jaskier too, and he didn’t want to weaken himself; signs weren’t exactly easy to cast.

He rode wide around the corner, so he could cut obliquely across and come at them head-on. An arrow flew at him and he deflected it with the sword, glad to discover that his reflexes had come back enough for that. “I told you I’m a Witcher,” he said, “this is a terrible idea.”

There were four of them, none on horseback, and they all looked hungry and desperate, and his feat with the arrow had sent them into a panic, but one of them still held his ground-- another young man, ragged, holding a nice sword he’d clearly found and didn’t know how to use properly.

“Just give us your food,” he said. 

“I’m sorry,” Geralt said, “we’re desperate too.” He kept moving; the archer was still around here, somewhere, maybe two archers because he didn’t think the one he’d panicked earlier had tried to shoot him just now. Jaskier was right behind him, angling to stay out of reach of the bandit’s sword.

“We’re starving!” the bandit said, and rushed at him with his sword. Geralt parried it easily, knocking it out of the man’s inexpert grip, and they rode past. Jaskier’s horse screamed in alarm and crowded Roach, who tossed her head and took off faster. 

Geralt let them run for a few minutes, just to put some distance between them and the overly-determined would-be bandits, before he pulled Roach back down to a more reasonable pace. Jaskier was swearing, and as Roach slowed, his horse didn’t, still panicked and far too close.

“Jaskier,” Geralt said, “control your beast,” because he could feel Roach curling her hindquarters in, head high-- she wasn’t a kicker usually but she would if provoked, and this was provocation.

“I fucking-- I can’t-- fuck!” Jaskier said, and his tone finally penetrated Geralt’s distraction, and he turned to look.

There was an arrow-shaft standing out of the side of the horse, which was a sensible explanation for the panic. “Fuck,” Geralt said. The palfrey crowded against Roach’s flank, whites of her eyes showing in terror, and he reached out and took her bridle, forcing her out at least arm’s length so she wouldn’t trip Roach as they ran. It was still too close, and Roach was still unhappy, but it meant some measure of safety. Geralt took a long look at the horse, and realized with a sudden jolt that the arrow wasn’t just in the horse, it was through the back of Jaskier’s thigh as well, which could explain why he was smelling human blood and why Jaskier hadn’t stopped swearing.

And it meant that every stride the horse took was tearing at Jaskier’s thigh muscle, which was also very bad. Torn muscles took him forever to heal, and surely were that much worse for a human.

Geralt pulled Roach to a stop, and the palfrey swung around, trying to free its head from his grip. Nothing for it; he let go and then used his freed hand to cast an  _ Axii _ on the horse, freezing it in place, eyes blank.

“What the fuck,” Jaskier said.

“Spell of control,” Geralt said. Fuck, he really wasn’t strong enough for an  _ Axii _ ; he could feel it pulling at him like a thin wire being drawn from under his ribs, the tether keeping the horse under his control. He sheathed his sword, struggling a bit to do it fluidly with only one hand, and said “Ciri, take Roach’s reins,” and swung off, handing her the reins once he was on the ground. It was hard to hold the Axii in his hand, but he had to keep a grip on it to maintain the control. Fuck, he’d need both hands for this. He went up to the arrow side to look at it. It hadn’t gone in deeply to the horse, likely, given the length of shaft still protruding-- the archer as inexpert as the swordsman, it seemed-- but deeply enough that Jaskier was well-pinned. He put his hand around it and in an inspired moment, stuck the Axii between his front teeth and bit down hard. Maybe it was just his desperation but it held. He set his other hand on Jaskier’s leg, then looked up at him.

Jaskier had gone pale, and was still holding tightly on to the horse’s reins even though the beast was motionless. He met Geralt’s eyes and nodded tightly. Geralt tugged lightly, just to be sure it wasn’t lodged in an upper layer, and Jaskier’s breath hitched but he kept his silence. The arrow was stuck firm. 

Geralt felt for the heavy knife in his belt and then remembered that it was with his armor back in Cintra. “Fuck,” he said, around the burning tingle of the sign between his incisors. “Knife?”

“I have,” Jaskier said, and stopped short, because he’d tried to move and couldn’t. He hissed in a breath, and said, “Saddlebag, there, near the top,” and Geralt dug through the bag he pointed to and found a beautifully-crafted folding knife with a wooden handle with mother-of-pearl inlay. 

He opened the knife and made a face, but it would have to do. Ciri, he noticed, had circled Roach around, expertly enough, and was facing back down the road from where they’d fled the bandits, listening alertly. He remembered he was supposed to be taking care of her, and dredged up something to say. “That’s good, Ciri,” he said as clearly as he could without moving his jaw, “keep an ear out, I won’t be a moment.”

She nodded, and turned back to look down the road with renewed resolve. Geralt looked up at Jaskier again, and the bard had his eyes closed, facing away. “I’m cutting it now,” he said, and forced the knife through as quick and clean as he could. Jaskier made an awful little noise, swallowed down. Geralt hissed; the sign in his teeth was making him drool, but there was no way to really fix that without closing his mouth, which he couldn’t do. He dropped the knife and the cut arrow, took Jaskier’s calf in his hands to pull the foot out of the stirrup, and then took his thigh between both hands. “Lean toward me,” he said. “Drop the other stirrup and lean toward me.”

Jaskier made an awful noise. “If I lean it pulls on it,” he gasped. 

“I’ve got to pull on it,” Geralt said. It was an awkward angle. “Put your hand on my shoulder and come toward me, I’ll take the weight on your leg. We’ve got to try to come straight this way.”

“I’m going to have to scream,” Jaskier said tightly.

“Then do it,” Geralt said. He glanced up. “Need something to bite?” It was almost funny, because the sign he was holding in his teeth was so unpleasant. It was burning his lips. If he put it in Jaskier’s mouth it would kill him. 

“No, let’s just do this fast,” Jaskier said. 

“Just-- come to me, trust me to catch you. I’ll guide it.”

“I trust you,” Jaskier said thinly, and put his hand down carefully onto Geralt’s shoulder. Geralt took his leg in both hands and began to pull it gently. Jaskier cried out, and lurched over toward him. Geralt took most of the bard’s weight in his hands and pulled, and Jaskier screamed then, a horrible sound. In a moment, Geralt had Jaskier draped over his shoulder, and let him down to the ground. Jaskier was shaking, twitching in awful little spasmodic jerks, but he was only making quiet sporadic whimpers.

“Lie still,” Geralt said. “Hold pressure and lie still. I have to cut this out, I can’t hold the cantrip on the horse much longer.” It was really aching now, like a tearing feeling inside his chest, and his mouth was on fire and he couldn’t swallow and he was absolutely slobbering everywhere. It tasted of burning. He knew he’d be fine, but it was going to tear loose pretty soon and then he’d be fucked if he wasn’t ready to let the horse go. The poor thing was going to go wild.

“Yeah,” Jaskier said, “yeah, that’s, yeah, fine.”

Geralt had to take the palfrey’s saddle off, carefully-- if the animal weren’t under his control it would’ve panicked and run away, but it just stood quietly. He had to adjust the sign, and he held it carefully and then bit down with the canines on one side, and when he let go, it held. It hurt, though. A lot. 

He picked up the knife and pushed at the horse’s flank with his hand, trying to feel where the arrow was. He cut quickly, and pulled the arrowhead out-- it had lodged in the bone of a rib, and the horse would feel it for a while but if there was no infection she’d recover, and most importantly, she could continue as they were. He pulled a number of the saddlebags off and stacked them hastily next to Jaskier, who was lying on his back with both legs bent staring white-faced at the sky, but was at least conscious. Then he jammed a clean handkerchief against the horse’s wound, put the saddle back on over it, and came and gave her reins to Jaskier.

“I think the cantrip will hold but I don’t want her to bolt,” he said. “Just hang on there.” It was sore by now, terribly sore, but he could hold it, so he did, jaw going slowly numb.

“Okay,” Jaskier said vaguely. 

Geralt went to Roach and pulled his saddlebag off, carrying it over. His stock of literally all herbs was horribly depleted, but he had a tiny dram left at the bottom of a vial of tincture of meadowsweet, and in a scrap of bandage he still had some bits of the lichen to pack wounds. Those were safe for humans, though he paused and sniffed at the tincture to be sure he didn’t have anything else mixed in there. Sometimes he carelessly used things like White Gull that would kill a human, because they were easier to work with and it made little enough difference, for his constitution. But this one was just normal grain alcohol, which was easier to come by.

He checked for debris, packed the wound quickly, bandaged it as tightly as he could, and knelt up a moment to look into Jaskier’s face.

Jaskier opened his eyes and looked up at him, his eyes very blue and his lashes very dark and his face very white. “It didn’t hit the artery,” he said, “or I’d be dead already, right?”

“Mm,” Geralt said. 

“So then I’ll be fine,” Jaskier said. “ _ You’d _ barely notice something like this.” He grinned, wan and brave. 

“Geralt,” Ciri said, “I think there’s someone--”

“I’m not human, Jaskier,” Geralt said. “Stay down, I’ll come back in a moment and get you up.” He took the palfrey’s reins, led her a few steps away from Jaskier, and then pulled the sign carefully out from between his teeth, and released it. It rebounded on him with a stinging snap, and he knew it’d be a while before he could make another one of those. Sometimes animals came out of an  _ Axii _ hard, sometimes easy, and fortunately the horse came out of it easy, just tossing her head in confusion and sidestepping away from the injured side, as if she could escape the pain that way.

“Ciri,” Geralt said, once he’d wiped his mouth enough to speak-- his lips were blistered on the inside-- “you get on Jaskier’s horse. She’s hurt, so she might fight you and be a bit hard to control, but I know you’re a good rider.” His tongue was numb and his whole jaw felt like it had been bashed with a rock, but he’d live..

Ciri wheeled Roach skillfully-- the horse must like her, to handle like that-- and came over, dismounting. He gave her the reins to both animals, turned back, threw the saddlebags onto Roach, and then picked Jaskier up like a child.

“I can ride,” Jaskier said, but Geralt could see he’d gone a bit shocky, light-headed and pale. 

“You don’t have to,” Geralt said. He put him up onto Roach, then swung up behind him, and Ciri mounted the palfrey and they set off again. His knees were shaking with weariness, but Jaskier was undoubtedly feeling far worse.

Jaskier’s head lolled against Geralt’s shoulder for a moment before he managed to recollect himself. “If this happened to you, you wouldn’t even notice it,” he said again. 

Geralt settled Jaskier more firmly in the saddle, pulling the injured leg so that it was supported by his instead of just dangling. Jaskier went tense, but didn’t resist, and in a moment he put his hand over Geralt’s where it was wrapped around his waist. 

“If that had happened to me just now, I’d be almost as screwed as you are,” Geralt said softly into his ear. “But you should be fine, if we can get it to heal clean.”

“Sure,” Jaskier said. 

“Just keep breathing,” Geralt said, “steady and deep, all right?”

Ciri was talking softly to her horse, soothing it, and she glanced over at him after a moment. “She’s not limping or anything but I think it hurts her.”

“I’m sure it does,” Geralt said. “We have to keep moving for a little while.” 


	7. A Kind Of Snail, Or Turtle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaskier is good at extemporizing but his metaphors need work.

“I wish I had something to give you for the pain,” Geralt said. His own pain had dulled, and faded away except for a lingering ache in his teeth and the raw soreness of the blisters, and now he just sort of felt hollowed-out. He really could’ve used another night in that inn, but it was too late now. They had to keep moving. 

“Most of what you carry would poison me anyway,” Jaskier said. He was tense, one hand wrapped tightly around Geralt’s arm and the other curled white-knuckled under the pommel of the saddle. Geralt could smell the blood, could feel it soaking through the bandage and soaking through his pants where he had his leg pressed against Jaskier’s to hold it still. 

“Not everything,” Geralt said. “I’m out now, though. We need to find somewhere we can get help.”

“I’ve been injured before,” Jaskier said. “This isn’t-- I’m not-- I’ve done this before.”

“Oh?” Geralt said. “What’s your worst injury?”

“Okay,” Jaskier said, “I get how usually, the way we do things, I carry the conversation.” He freed his hand from the saddle to gesture, but it was tighter than his normal body language, and he returned to his white-knuckled grip right away. “But I-- talking isn’t. Fun.”

Geralt sighed. “Sorry,” he said. 

“So you tell me your worst one,” Jaskier said. “And then we can ask Ciri.”

“Ask me what?” Ciri asked. 

Jaskier patted Geralt’s arm, clearly indicating he was to do the talking. Geralt sighed again.

“We’re keeping Jaskier’s mind off things by talking,” Geralt said. “And I asked what the worst injury he’s ever had was, but he doesn’t feel like talking about it.”

“Not this,” Jaskier clarified. 

“Right, not this,” Geralt said. “So I’m to tell him what my worst injury ever has been.”

“Doesn’t the mornat qualify?” Ciri asked. 

Jaskier laughed. “I’ve seen worse,” he said. 

Geralt considered it. “I mean,” he said. Better than dredging up some horrible old story of something else.

“The one on your belly that looks like teeth-marks,” Jaskier suggested.

“Ciri hasn’t watched me bathe as often as you have,” Geralt said mildly. “She doesn’t know what my scars look like.”

“You have teeth marks on your belly?” she asked, horrified.

“That one wasn’t that bad,” Geralt said. It had been horrible. “Hm. I can’t easily think what was worst. Oh, I almost died when a striga bit my neck. Almost tore my throat out, I lost enough blood that I passed out almost instantly.”

“Why didn’t it kill you?” Ciri asked.

“I bit her right back,” Geralt said. “Pure self-defense. She passed out too. We both survived.” He considered it. “She might still be alive, that was only maybe twenty years ago. Thirty?” He'd never checked back.

“Did it leave a scar?” Jaskier asked.

“Mm,” Geralt said, “probably,” but he wasn’t about to either let go of the reins or let go of Jaskier to check. 

“That’s the worst one?” Ciri asked.

“Sure,” Geralt said.

“No it’s not,” Jaskier said.

Geralt sighed. “I did get disembowelled once,” he said. “I don’t recommend that, by the way. Takes ages to heal. And your guts never quite go back in the same order they were, so it feels weird for even longer.”

“Pretty sure that just straight-up kills humans,” Jaskier commented. “But, I’ll make a note, that’s a good detail.”

“Dis-- is that when your guts come out?” Ciri asked, fascinated.

“Yeah,” Geralt said. “I mean… it was only a bit of intestine, but it’s _really_ upsetting to see your inside parts on the outside of you.”

Ciri shivered at that. “Ew,” she said. “I don’t-- I don’t want to think--”

“Let’s not,” Geralt said. She’d just survived a battle, she’d probably seen horrible things. What had he been thinking? “What about you?”

“Nothing that compares with getting _disembowelled_ ,” Ciri said. “I broke my arm falling out of a tree once.”

“Well, that’s not nothing,” Geralt said. 

Jaskier let his head loll back against Geralt’s shoulder. “This is comfortable,” he said. “If only my leg didn’t hurt. I should have you carry me more often.”

Geralt looked down at him. His eyes were closed, and his face was taut, but he was pretending to relax. “Hm,” he said. He wanted to do something, even some small gesture of comfort, but his hands were both occupied, and he couldn’t see Jaskier appreciating him rubbing his face on the other’s face. He could smell woodsmoke, though, so they weren’t far off from-- something, anyway. Maybe a farm, maybe another camp of bandits.

“This is a really extreme way of asking me to be more physically affectionate,” Geralt said. “Next time, you don’t have to hire a guy to shoot you. You really can just ask.”

Jaskier’s eyes shot open and he gave Geralt a look. “Ah, you know how to sweet-talk a fellow,” he said. “Next time I _won’t_ hire a guy to shoot me, then.”

“What’s,” Ciri said, and trailed off. “What’s that?” It was brighter ahead, noticeably.

“Either a clearing or the edge of the woods,” Jaskier said.

“Edge,” Geralt said, scenting cautiously. “There’s a settlement beyond.” The wind brought him human habitation smells: cattle, goats, the smoke he’d been smelling already, plus more subtle things-- humans, cooking, horses, the odor roof thatch gave off after rain.

Jaskier tilted his head back against Geralt’s shoulder. “Are you _smelling_ that?”

“Yes,” Geralt said shortly. 

“I wondered how you knew shit like that,” Jaskier said, sounding almost indignant. Then, after a pause, “Can you smell _me_?”

“Well enough to know how you’re feeling, most of the time,” Geralt said. It was too late for Jaskier to run screaming and he wasn’t capable at the moment anyway. 

“That’s,” Ciri said.

“Creepy,” Geralt said, “I know, which is why I don’t usually say so. At the moment, Jaskier, you mostly smell of blood. What I’m smelling ahead suggests a sizeable settlement but not a city.”

They crested the little hill and came out into the clearing beyond. There was a palisade surrounding a complex of houses; not quite a village, but a farmstead encompassing several families, at least, Geralt supposed. And facing the road, there was a sturdy-looking gate.

They paused, and contemplated it.

“Don’t ride right up to the gate,” Jaskier said. 

“No,” Geralt said, “you’re right.” Friendly, unafraid people didn’t build palisades like that. He sighed. “This is the sort of place where I’d have you go up to them while I hang back,” he said.

“I can do it,” Ciri said.

Geralt considered it for a moment. He really didn’t want her going out of arm’s reach. “I don’t see as we have a choice,” Jaskier said. “It’s either Ciri does it-- er, Finn, we were calling you Finn-- or you sling me over your shoulder and carry me up there like a sack of potatoes.”

“Oh come on,” Jaskier said, his voice muffled by being somewhere in the vicinity of Geralt’s lower back. 

“Don’t whine,” Geralt said. 

“It’ll add versimilitude,” Jaskier said.

Geralt sighed. “We don’t need versimilitude,” he said. When he talked, his voice resonated through his whole body, and up through Jaskier’s, and it felt kind of good. Which was a nice distraction because his leg was on fucking fire.

Ciri was following at a little distance with the horses. For some reason Geralt had insisted on taking his hat off, so now his disguise was rubbish. Not that it had been much of one to begin with.

They’d picked a route that would let them be seen approaching the gate, and were moving at what Jaskier knew was a pretty slow pace by Geralt’s standards. There were people about, and he was sure they’d been seen, but in his current position there wasn’t much he could do but hang there and play dead.

He heard a door or gate or something open. 

“Good afternoon, madam,” Geralt rumbled, coming to a halt. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but: two things. First, there are some brigands on the road nearby, and second, is there anywhere under any of your roofs I could put my friend down to tend to his injury.”

“Is he dying?” a woman’s voice said, elderly and uncertain.

“No,” Jaskier put in, “but I sure am sore.”

He felt Geralt sigh, but there was no sound of it. “It’s an arrow wound, and if I can treat it while it’s still fresh I’m hoping I can avoid infection,” Geralt said.

“Are you a healer?” the woman asked.

“I’ve some skill,” Geralt said. Then, because he was an idiot, he said, “I’m a Witcher. We’re trained in alchemy and potion brewing, and I’ve a great deal of experience at treating wounds.”

“A Witcher,” the woman said. 

“I’m not,” Jaskier put in. “I’m a bard.”

“A bard,” the woman said, and leaned around to peer at him around Geralt. Geralt sighed, and turned so Jaskier’s face was easier for her to see.

“Hello,” Jaskier said, giving her a cheerful wave from under Geralt’s arm. “I promise we’re not scary people, I’m just in a spot of trouble.”

The woman regarded him dubiously, but the corner of her mouth twitched. “I see,” she said. She looked up at Geralt again. “And you’re a Witcher?”

“Yes,” Geralt said, “but I’m not monster-hunting at the moment. I’m trying to get my friend and his apprentice to safety, and I’m clearly not doing a very good job at it.”

“We’ve terrible troubles with ghouls lately,” the woman said.

“There’s not much I can do about them unless you happen to also have a silver sword lying about,” Geralt said. “As you can probably see, this war business is as hard on Witchers as it is on everyone else.”

Jaskier had never really noticed before how much Geralt sounded like he was reading a script off of a cue card sometimes. He wasn’t even acting, this was really him. “ _Please_ let us in,” Jaskier said wistfully.

“And there’s somewhat ailing the local cunning-woman, or at any rate she hasn't been by in a month or more now,” the woman went on, “so we’re quite short on healing at the moment. If you know how to brew any medicines, we’d be right glad of your expertise.”

“If you have a good herb garden,” Geralt said, “we could come to an arrangement.”

A little later, Jaskier was comfortably installed on a padded bench in the corner of the farmstead’s enormous kitchen, with Ciri sitting next to his elbow while his injured leg was stretched out full length, and Geralt had his sleeves rolled up and was sorting through the household’s bundled herbs at the big table in the middle of the kitchen, with an assorted cast of characters Jaskier couldn’t even begin to keep straight-- an old woman, a young boy, a middling woman who might be the boy’s mother, a youngish man who didn’t seem to be related to any of them, a teenaged girl who kept coming and going and seemed bored.

“Feverfew,” Geralt said, laying a bundle down. “For the obvious.”

“What’s obvious?” asked the little boy at his elbow. Geralt glanced over at him.

“Fever,” he said, with no trace of impatience. “It’s also good against worms, gum disease, and an assortment of human ailments my instructor redacted from the book he was teaching us with because they didn’t apply. I suspect it’s something to do with reproduction, he was pretty keen on scratching that stuff out.”

“Why?” the old woman asked.

Geralt, for some reason, looked at Jaskier, and quirked his eyebrows. Somehow Jaskier understood; he was clearly leaning in to the idea of turning over a new leaf and not being such a surly bastard. “Because Witchers can’t reproduce,” he said to the old woman. “So there’s no point teaching us about that sort of thing. I hope your cunning woman is back on her feet before anyone needs those particular services, because I have no education into their formulation or use.”

“ _What_ particular services?” Ciri whispered to Jaskier.

Jaskier eyed her. “How old are you?” he asked.

She straightened up. “I’m _fourteen_ ,” she said mulishly. 

Jaskier mulled that over. “I’m not getting involved in this,” he said. 

“Woundseal, boneset, meadowsweet,” Geralt was saying. “Not as good as willow bark but it’ll do.”

The first thing Geralt had done was to wash and re-dress Jaskier’s injury, which had been awful, but then he’d also given him rather a strong tincture of something or other, and Jaskier wasn’t sure whether the herbs or the pure alcohol they’d been steeped in had done the trick but either way he was, blessedly, feeling very little pain. This farmstead seemed to be full of a combination of nice people and paranoid bastards, which was probably just as well, and so Geralt had been given free run of the herb stores but there were several surly young men hanging about looking suspicious. Geralt had initially been somewhat unnerved by them, and Jaskier knew it was not that he was afraid of them, but that he was worried they were going to make him fight them, and he hated fighting humans. But Geralt loved talking about things he knew about, and he knew about herbs, and these people wanted to hear, and in the face of that he hadn’t been able to hold onto any crankiness or irritability. 

Much of Geralt’s testiness, Jaskier had learned, was due to spending decades with people only ever being suspicious of him, and using that to excuse cruelty and other ill-treatment. It was possible to draw him out astonishingly easily if you were only nice to him, but then there was always an inevitable backlash when he got too nervous about being vulnerable. Really, Jaskier thought, it was like Geralt was a kind of snail, or turtle...

He yawned, filing the metaphor away to work on later. “Should get Geralt to give a guest-lecture at Oxenfurt,” he said, as the witcher went on enumerating the names and uses of the various herbs.

“So you’re really a professor there?” Ciri asked, leaning in, clearly over her sulk that he wasn’t going to explain human reproduction to her. At some point somebody was going to have to, possibly Geralt, and Jaskier only hoped he could be there to see it.

Jaskier shook his head. “No, I just do guest lectures sometimes,” he said. And research. And lessons. And various other jobs, enough that he often drew a stipend. Still, though. 

“On _poetry_ , though,” she said. 

“Shh,” Jaskier said. “It’s a secret, I told you.”

He probably shouldn’t have admitted to the Lion Cub of Cintra that morning over breakfast that Jaskier was an alias and he had another name under which he’d published a number of successful books of poetry, some of which she had been taught by her tutors, but she’d really needed cheering up and he’d figured that would do it. She’d mentioned his real name first, listing her favorite poets, and let’s be real here, his motivation had actually been that he was too flattered to hold his tongue. Also, it was going to be entertaining to see how many more decades Geralt could go without ever beginning to wonder why his bard was named after a flower and had no surname or place name suffix. It wasn’t even a _good_ alias, but he had so much good work out under it now he couldn’t possibly give it up.

Also he hated his real name and wouldn’t answer to it in person-- even at Oxenfurt, no one dared call him _Julian_ \-- so maybe Geralt wasn’t really missing out on anything.

Though he should probably admit to Geralt that the bulk of his income was that university stipend and royalties from selling books, not the scraps he got playing bard out on the road. It wasn’t like he was holding out, though; he couldn’t exactly access any of that money from out here. 

Geralt was now on to the portion of the activity-cum-lecture where he was steeping things in either boiling water or other various substances, and the young woman had come in hauling a truly impressive stock of jars. The only part Jaskier was interested in was that they clearly had a still here or somewhere nearby, because they had a great stock of pure alcohol. Geralt was making up little cheesecloth bags of herbs and putting them in jars and pouring the alcohol or warmed lard or whatever over them, with earnest commentary.

“More than half of my knowledge isn’t applicable here,” he was saying, when Jaskier tuned back in. “Most of what I make is only suitable for a Witcher, and we’re not human. But this basic stuff won’t hurt you, and I’ll label it well so you won’t be confused.”

“What makes it only suitable for a Witcher?” the little boy asked.

“We’re… different,” Geralt said. “A lot of the potions I use would be poisonous to you.”

“But they’re not poisonous to you?” the little boy asked.

Geralt made a rueful face. “They are,” he said, “but I can survive it. I’m still recovering from poisoning myself two days ago, though, which is why I had such trouble with those bandits.”

“Why did you poison yourself?” the little boy asked.

“Because I had a particularly nasty monster that was trying to eat me from the inside,” Geralt said, “and the poison kept it weak enough that I had time to go for help.”

“ _You_ needed help?” The little boy’s eyes were wide. Jaskier had time to reflect that Geralt was good with children, always was, even when he was at his most gruff and was scaring them off on purpose-- he understood kids in a way a lot of grown men didn’t. Didn’t talk down to them, didn’t baby-talk, but spoke in ways they’d understand. He’d spent time with children, sometime in his life.

“Even Witchers need help sometimes,” Geralt said. He pointed to Jaskier. “I had to have Jaskier there help me, and it was very scary for both of us.”

“Is that why you’re taking care of him now?” the boy asked. 

Geralt looked at Jaskier. “No,” he said, “I’m taking care of him because we’re friends.”

  
  


Much of the worry about healers was because there were two members of the household with varying sorts of chronic ailments, and no one who lived there knew how to make the medicines they relied on. Geralt spent a while with the empty medicine jars, smelling them and assembling the ingredients he could tell the medicines had contained, and then once he’d seen Ciri and Jaskier safely settled and was satisfied it was safe, he went out in the woods gathering ingredients, with a few of the household members. 

Jaskier was fed and given watered wine like an invalid and propped up in a place of honor near the fire in the main room, and as evening drew down, he and Ciri played and sang, and Ciri recited one of his poems that she’d memorized from that first anthology he’d been published in, which was quite sweet. 

As it happened, it was a poem about Geralt, but the metaphors were subtle enough that it wasn’t obvious; it was ostensibly about a snowy hillside with a dark history. Still, Jaskier was rather glad Geralt hadn’t reappeared, though he’d poked his head in to check on them easily half a dozen times. It didn’t take a study of poetry to pick out certain things.

His leg was bothering him some, but he’d expected to be suffering more than he was. Likely, the worst was yet to come, as whatever was working away in there either turned to infection or not. As it was, the only real detriment was that it was very difficult to get up and go to the privy, and he was rather more tired than he should have been, and supporting his voice properly was difficult. But it was a smallish room, so he didn’t have to sing out, and with Ciri to do the high parts in duets, it was easier. 

As the evening wore on, the rest of the members of the household came in-- all the suspicious, surly young men, and several young women who’d apparently been busy elsewhere or perhaps in hiding from the strangers.

One of the young women had a marvellously fat infant, of the delightful age where they could sit up and coo at things but couldn’t make too much trouble yet. Jaskier had set his lute down to take a drink and try to carefully rearrange his legs, and he lit up when he saw the child. 

“Please,” he said, “please please, can I hold your _perfect_ fat baby?”

The woman laughed. “She is gloriously fat, is she not?’

“She is _perfect_ ,” Jaskier said. “Please. I love fat babies. Please let me hold your fat baby. Just for a moment!”

Geralt was, out of nowhere, suddenly revealed to have been standing at Jaskier’s shoulder already, because he rumbled wordlessly, and then said, “I didn’t know you were a fan of children.”

“Are you _not_?” Jaskier said. “I ask you sincerely, what greater thing is there in this entire world than a gloriously fat happy baby? I challenge you to name one thing better!”

The mother perched next to him on the bench and carefully transferred the child to his arms, and he dandled her in sheer delight, then held her to his chest. She fussed a little, since he was a stranger, but the mother remained next to him and cooed at the child, and after a moment to settle, she turned and regarded him with a scrunched-up, puzzled little face.

He made a wide-eyed face at her, and she grabbed at the decoration on his jacket and flailed around a bit, and Geralt said, “I suppose she is cute.”

“The _very cutest_ ,” Jaskier said. “ _Aah_ I can’t stand it. Look at her chubby thighs! Look at her chubby wrists! She is _so perfect_.” 

The infant had caught sight of Geralt when he’d spoken, and stared at him in wide-eyed wonder. Geralt widened his eyes back, and she laughed suddenly, in apparent simple delight.

“She _is_ perfect,” Geralt said, his mouth quirking with a funny soft wryness, and Jaskier understood-- most humans didn’t react like that to his eyes, at all. She turned her attention back to Jaskier, and he made a face and she laughed again. 

After a few more moments she realized her mother wasn’t touching her and started to fuss again, and the mother took her back but sat nearby, so Jaskier took up his lute again and sang an extemporaneous song about The Most Perfect Fat Baby That Ever There Was In All Of The Land, which actually made Geralt laugh in a soft amused-delighted way that Jaskier had never actually witnessed before. 

The Most Perfect Fat Baby That Ever There Was In All Of The Land turned out to have quite a singable chorus, and Jaskier got most of the room to join in on the “Fat baby! Fat baby! Fat baby!” refrain, and it had the entirely expected side effect of winning over all of the surly young men even though Geralt didn’t sing (Geralt had never one time in the twentysome years Jaskier had been performing in his presence showed the slightest engagement with any kind of music, so this was not a surprise) because Geralt had wound up sitting down next to him once the young woman had moved to her own chair, so Geralt was right there getting progressively less scary by association as Jaskier extemporized new verses about the child’s inevitable future as a great woman of some kind, because no child of such voluptuous magnificence could fail to achieve-- he’d started off with a verse about her becoming an adventurer, but then he’d done one of her being a healer, and then one of her being an alderwoman, and then one of her becoming a blacksmith, and with some prompting from the audience, a baker, a miller, a wheelwright, or a candlemaker. He then extemporized a verse where she went to the university and became a famous bard, which everyone thought was hilarious and self-serving of him, and he managed to tie it all back in to how important bards were and how everyone should always give them food and money all of the time. Those were easy rhymes because he’d done versions of that verse in basically every improvised song he’d ever done, except of course for Toss A Coin, where he’d been begging on Geralt’s behalf instead. 

When he finished, there was much cheerful uproar in the room, and the baby was danced around by various of her kinfolks including one of the Surly Young Men who was quite clearly her doting father, and after a bit of this had settled down, Ciri said, “How do you just… _write_ a song, that fast?”

“Ah,” Jaskier said, beaming, “practice, but also, _music theory_ , and now I know what I need to teach you as my apprentice.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ayy i know how this story ends but only so i can write a sequel so don't despair
> 
> footnote 2: yes Finn is the masculine version of Fiona, I know that because my real-live sister is named Fiona and hasn't watched the Witcher yet but is thrilled to death that pop culture is getting another Princess Fiona because she's a little tired of the old one
> 
> FOOTNOTE THREE MAJOR UPDATE: THE SONG EXISTS [HERE](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22811167)


	8. Arrow's Flight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT: i only just realized that there is a huge chunk missing from this chapter???? I've just added it back in.   
> PEOPLE that didn't even make SENSE without the missing bit??? how did I not notice this??? 
> 
> Everything before the asterisks is newly posted. Good heavens, how did I not notice this?

Geralt was too nervous to sleep. These people were far too kind. Ridiculously too kind. There had to be something-- they were hiding something, surely. He couldn’t scent anything out of the ordinary, couldn’t come up with anything to justify his suspicion, which just made him the more suspicious.

It was just as well; in order to properly do alchemy, he needed to meditate. He took the collection of jars with him into the room they’d been given, which had two beds and a table and chair in it, and set them all up on the table, and arrayed them into the correct logical orders, and waited until both Jaskier and Ciri’s breathing had steadied out into sleep. There was a blanket chest at the foot of one bed, and so he took the sole chair, wedged it under the door handle, and sat on the chest instead. 

Then he focused in turn on each of the jars, and slipped sideways into the place where things made sense.

He was trying to brew half of the jars to human-suitable strength, and the other half, he’d separated out and had slipped in the few things he could still scrape together out of his carefully-hoarded collection of magical creature components. He really didn’t have much, but he could get probably one vision-in-the-dark potion, maybe two or three of varying constitutions for quick healing or at least blood-clotting, and another two or three that would help with reflex speed and endurance and the like. He’d have to rely on human-strength stuff for the rest, but that was fine. What he was making for these people would be better than anything their cunning-woman could brew, unless she had mage powers. 

Not that he expected them to be grateful. They were being kind now, maybe because Ciri was cute, more likely because Jaskier was cute. But they would find a reason, soon enough, to be afraid of Geralt, and in his experience, that kind of fear always manifested in violence, and the more intensely the longer it was delayed. 

There was only a tiny window in this room, not big enough to escape out of, but he’d already tested the wall; he could break out of it with just his normal strength. If they came for him, he could get Ciri and Jaskier out, provided Ciri listened to him-- he could only carry one of them at once, at his normal strength, and it might be hairy, getting to the horses-- but he could do it, he could get out. It’d be easiest to get through the palisade if he had the strength to cast an  _ Aard _ at it but they might fare all right even without. He could come up with something.

So he sank deeper into meditation, into the place beyond where things made sense-- into the place where there was nothing, and he breathed, and felt everything, and felt nothing, and felt everything, and made himself into a conduit.

He came out of it a great deal less anxious and more serene, and he could feel that he was inwardly in much better condition as well. He needed to sleep too, but that would have to wait; he could heal without it. He wasn’t feeling quite in control of himself enough to share a bed with Jaskier while Ciri was in the room. That was an awkwardness he earnestly wanted to avoid. 

He opened his eyes. It was dark in the room, but he could see. Good; he’d managed to heal himself from the toxicity enough that his normal night vision had come back. Without potions, he still needed some light to see, but a lot less than a human would. He breathed deeply in relief. His head felt better, his joints felt better, he felt sharper and stronger. He was just tired, but that would have to wait.

He rolled his head on his neck, shook out his arms, stood up and stretched his back, and then he set to sorting the jars, and decanting the potions he’d made for himself into the tiny bottles he preferred to carry. Most of his store of them were lost or broken, but the girl here had found some. He wasn’t sure what they’d be doing with them here, but they’d scrounged enough for his tastes, and he had enough leather scraps left in his inventory to wrap them all securely.

“Hey,” Jaskier whispered suddenly, and he startled slightly, then turned to look. Jaskier’s eyes gleamed from the edge of the bed. “Come to bed. It’s safe and I won’t molest you. Not with the kid in the room.”

Geralt hesitated, then shook his head, then remembered Jaskier couldn’t see in the dark. “I won’t sleep,” he said. 

“Just lie down and rest,” Jaskier said. 

“I can’t,” Geralt said.

Jaskier sighed, and tried to turn over, then paused with a sharp catch in his breath. Pain; his leg was troubling him. Geralt came and sat on the bed, and put his hand on Jaskier’s leg. “Let me look,” he said.

“It’s dark,” Jaskier said. 

“I can see in the dark,” Geralt reminded him. He began by holding Jaskier’s leg between his hands. It was warm, a bit warmer than a human should be, but not by much; he put the back of his hand against Jaskier’s cheek briefly to check. No fever, or not noticeably; Geralt ran hot, so a human with a fever might still register as cool to him, but he thought he’d be able to tell. 

Jaskier grabbed his hand, blindly in the dark, and held it between both of his for a moment. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “It’s not throbbing much, I know that’s a sign of infection. It just hurts. I’m all right.”

Geralt sat still for a moment. “If I trusted these people, I’d leave you here,” he confessed. “I don’t want to take you on the road with an injury like that. You can’t ride. But I don’t--”

“Don’t leave me,” Jaskier said. “I can keep up.”

“You can’t,” Geralt said. “But it’s not safe here.”

“These people are lovely,” Jaskier said. “We could stay one more day.”

“One,” Geralt said, “maybe.” But his instincts were telling him no. Still, it wasn’t worth fighting. He reached down to touch Jaskier’s bandage, and the bard grabbed his other hand as well.

“Leave it,” he said. “It’s all right. Let it be for now.”

“Fine,” Geralt said. He thought about it; he could kiss Jaskier, in the dark, and no one would see, and it would reassure him. So he stood up, but then bent over the bed and kissed Jaskier’s forehead. Jaskier was so startled he let go of Geralt’s hands, and Geralt straightened up and went back over to the table. 

He dug out his notebook and worked on making his notes for a while-- his last few encounters with monsters, which potions he’d used, what he’d observed of events-- until dawn began to lighten the window. Jaskier watched him for a while, but when he glanced over, the bard was asleep, pink-cheeked and innocent-looking. 

So was Ciri, who had her hands folded under one cheek like a painting of a cherub. It made Geralt feel strange in his chest, to look at each of them in turn. He didn’t know what the feeling was, and it was uncomfortable, and it made him want to run away from it. 

But he couldn’t run. He’d found his destiny, and it was this kid, and the only thing that seemed to make her really feel safe was that bard, and how he felt about it was immaterial. He breathed deep, centered himself, and pushed everything down again, slipping back into meditation-- this time for his own sake, not for the potions. 

Time gapped and when he blinked again the sun was up, and Ciri was sitting on one bed and Jaskier on the other, and they were whispering to one another. 

“-- meditating,” Jaskier was saying. “It’s like he’s asleep, but he’s not, and it’s creepy. Look, sometimes his eyes are open.”

“His eyes  _ are _ open,” Ciri answered, staring at him in fascination. “Oh creepy!”

“That’s because I’m awake,” Geralt said, and both of the others startled backwards. 

“Gahh,” Jaskier said. “Then why were you just sitting there like that?”

“Because I just woke up,” Geralt said. He rubbed his face. He felt better. He’d rather have slept, but he did feel a lot calmer. No howling mob had come for them in the middle of the night, though that didn’t mean one wasn’t awaiting them outside. 

Jaskier was putting a brave face on it, but he was in a lot of pain this morning; he smelled distressed and his heartbeat was thrumming with the stress of it, cold sweat down the back of his neck. Geralt made him lie down and submit to having the bandage changed on his leg, and picked his leg up to examine both openings of the wound. It was inflamed, but didn’t smell sceptic; he was good at picking out that scent, among others. This kind of deep, enclosed wound was the most dangerous; it could easily form an abscess down deep inside and fester and fester, and kill Jaskier after enormous suffering. Geralt doused it in anti-sceptic herb tincture, making sure the liquid flowed down all the way into the depths of the wound, which made Jaskier gasp and shove the edge of the pillow into his mouth. Then he re-packed the outer parts with anti-sceptic lichen so it wouldn’t heal shut before the interior had finished draining, bandaged it, and poured a healthy pain-killing dose down Jaskier’s throat.

“I’ll have to teach you all I know of herb-craft,” Geralt said to Ciri, who was watching it all in disgust and fascination. Whatever the future held for her, she’d need to know how to put a body back together, if only her own; that was just how the world worked.

“I think so,” she agreed. 

“Herb-craft by day,” Jaskier said tightly, looking horribly pale and wrung-out as he lay on the bed, “music theory in the evenings, you’ll be an unstoppable hero.” He visibly gathered himself and sat up, grimacing. “Oh, love, let me fix your hair so the hat fits.”

Ciri sat down on the bed next to Jaskier and he expertly took out her braid, combed her hair with his fingers, and put it back up again with practiced ease. Geralt had never asked, ever, whether the man had siblings, or even if he had a wife he left behind when he traveled, or anything like that. It had seemed like too much, like it wasn’t his business, like exhibiting curiosity would indicate too much interest on his part and make it harder to disentangle when it became necessary.

He didn’t ask now, either.

  
  


*******

No howling mob awaited them outside. Geralt gave Ciri his basket of potions to carry into the kitchen, and carried Jaskier in his arms. He was strong enough now to do it, especially so short a distance, and Jaskier was amused by it and wound his arms around Geralt’s neck.

“Look at me, I’m a rescued princess,” he said, kicking his good foot a little for the benefit of the family matriarch, the old woman who’d answered the door to them and was in the kitchen amiably bossing around one of the middle-aged women. 

“Oh, are you, love?” said the old woman, amused. 

“Hm,” Geralt said. “Too much vodka in the meadowsweet tincture.”

“Oh is that what it was,” Jaskier said. “Well I feel much better now. Can you carry me like this everywhere, all the time?”

“Hm,” Geralt said again. “Might interfere with my work, a bit.” But he let the old woman see the corner of his mouth turning up, just a little. He put Jaskier down on the bench along the wall, and took the basket from Ciri to lay out the ingredients on the table. “Finished these last night. They’ll be more potent than the normal type. I’ve put labels on them and I made my best guess at what a normal dose ought to be, but be aware, I’m not used to treating normal people. Start on the low end of the estimate and work up.”

The woman came over and turned over the paper labels he’d tied with string around the necks of the jars. “Tch,” she said, “you’ve handwriting just like my mother, in the old style.”

Geralt had never considered that before, particularly. “I probably use the old spellings too,” he said. He had noticed that people had atrocious spelling nowadays. 

“Oh because you’re a hundred,” Ciri said, putting it together.

“A hundred and three,” Jaskier said. “Remember he told us that?”

“Never,” the woman said, looking at Geralt. He felt uncomfortably exposed. 

“Mm,” he said, for want of anything better to say. He wanted quite badly to go somewhere that nobody was looking at him. 

“Oh well the things you must have seen, then,” the old woman said. “I’m only eighty, and I’ve traveled so little in all that time.”

Geralt nodded. “Seen some things,” he conceded. He glanced around; the middle-aged woman was gazing at him curiously but not with hostility, and a youngish man had come in and was moving about but only half-heeding their discussion. He looked back at the old woman, who hadn’t started to look hostile yet, didn’t have that creeping suspicion that always came on people sooner or later. “Mostly monsters.” He shrugged. “I’m not exactly. In society much.”

“Ah,” the middle-aged woman said, “I bet he could read the old letter!”

“Oh yes,” the old woman said, with an air of realization. “I can’t make head nor tail of the handwriting-- my grandmother’s father wrote it.”

Geralt had a moment as he tried to work out how old that would make it. He didn’t know how old humans lived to be. He hadn’t known any who’d died of old age. He made a face. “I’m only a hundred,” he said. 

“The date on it’s 1162,” the old woman said. “We can read that much.”

Geralt sighed. “I’d’ve been two,” he conceded. “Fine, I can probably read your letter.”

Over breakfast, which was nicer than Geralt had expected-- honey-sweetened bread with dried fruit bits in it, fermented milk in the porridge, hot tisane sweetened with honey to drink-- the old woman brought him a wooden box and sat next to him to reverently retrieve a battered, very old piece of paper, which he gently unfolded.

“I see your problem,” he said. “He had really terrible handwriting.” 

“He worked as a clerk for a while,” the old woman said. “Or so we’re told. First priority was economy of paper.”

“I see that,” Geralt said. “Well, if you’ve got plain paper I can try to transcribe it.”

Jaskier craned his neck to look at it, and made a noise of dismay. “I’ve a lot of experience reading old writing too but that looks awful.”

Geralt glanced over at him. “Why?”

Jaskier gave him a strange sideways look. “I work at the university in Oxenfurt,” he said, “when I’m not, er, bard-ing.”

“I thought you’d known one another for some time,” the old woman observed, though her tone was mildly amused and not yet curling toward suspicion. 

“Well, I’m not,” Geralt said, and hesitated. “Mm. Gifted. At conversation.”

“You are _profoundly_ gifted at understatement, however,” Jaskier said. 

“One of my few virtues,” Geralt said. One of the other household folks had gone and retrieved paper and ink and a pen, and handed them across the table. Geralt took them and shoved the rest of his bread into his mouth so he could wipe his hands clean and set to work while he chewed. 

“Not great at table manners either,” Jaskier pointed out, and Geralt just grunted and shook his head, for once unconcerned. 

The letter was some strange ramblings of an old man, pertaining largely to securing his legacy in the world. Geralt had to really puzzle at a few of the characters, and Jaskier weighed in enough that he finally slid the letter over toward the bard and let him work through it for a few moments. It did have some touching wishes toward the future of the family, and largely seemed positive. Geralt realized after he’d made it about halfway through that he should have handed off the transcription to Jaskier to begin with, as the bard’s addenda were done in a beautiful fair sloping script far more readable than the old-fashioned spidery scrawl Geralt had been taught. 

At any rate, by the time the dishes had been cleared after all the family had come through and eaten, they’d copied out a reasonably-legible fair copy of the letter. Bad and antique as Geralt’s handwriting was, it was better than the old man’s, and he had some idea at least of which ligatures had passed from common usage by now.

“I want you to add a note of who transcribed it for us and when,” the old woman said.

Geralt looked up in alarm. “Why?” he asked.

“Tch,” she said, “for history, of course.” She gave him a frank look, up and down. “Do you think we’re going to eat you, son?”

“I’m old enough to be your father and poisonous to boot,” Geralt said, nettled. 

“Notwithstanding,” Jaskier said, a bit abstractedly because he was writing, “she’s right, you can unwind a little.”

“Also I’ve seen a lot of horrible things in my very long life,” Geralt said, but was distracted as he glanced over and read what Jaskier had written.

At the bottom of the paper, in extra-flourishy handwriting, Jaskier had written _transcribed anno 1263 by Jaskier the bard and the notable Witcher, Geralt of Rivia_ , and was busy signing an ornate “Jaskier” underneath, decorated with little flourishes that managed to economically resemble buttercups, which he had clearly practiced. But under that, he wrote another pair of words, and then slid the paper over to Geralt.

 _Julian Pancratz_ , it said, and Geralt realized that of course, no normal human woman had birthed an entire child and then named it _Buttercup_ and sent it out into the world. A surname, though, rather than a location, meant noble breeding. Which wasn’t a surprise, exactly, but Geralt had gone this long without thinking about it. 

Now wasn’t the time to think about it either. He sighed, took the pen, and signed his name neatly and legibly. He just wrote _Geralt_ , though; the Rivia part was an affectation he didn’t feel he could in conscience keep up if Jaskier was using his actual name. 

It was a long time since he’d had cause to write his name; people generally didn’t make written contracts with Witchers. He wiped the pen clean and then looked at his battered, ink-stained fingers, and slid the letter back over to Jaskier so he could stand up from the table and go see what Ciri was doing.

She’d wandered outside with some of the boys from the household, the ones about her age. There were a couple of girls mixed in, too. Clearly, the children here weren’t worked too hard; one of the girls had a spindle and was sitting on a bench by the door, but several of the boys and Ciri were gathered around a patch of dirt where someone had sketched something out, and they were all weighing in on it. 

A map, Geralt thought, from the words he could hear. 

“Yes,” Ciri said. “Right there, that’s where we met them.”

“And there were four?” the boy asked.

“Yes,” she said. Then hesitated. “Er, I think.”

“Four,” Geralt confirmed, coming closer behind her. “Two with bows, two with swords, though they certainly didn’t know how to use the swords.”

The kids all turned to look at him in alarm, but it was the simple alarm of children who’d been caught goofing off, nothing more. “Right,” Ciri said.

“And the archer who shot Jaskier was using a bow he wasn’t really capable of drawing properly,” Geralt said. “They’re not real bandits, I think they’re just desperate people.”

The children all looked up at him with wide eyes, shifting nervously. One of them said, finally, clearly summoning his courage, “Is it true you’re a Witcher?”

One of the others hissed at him, but he went on doggedly, “Only I thought Witchers were supposed to be scary and you’re not.”

Geralt considered his answer carefully. “Scary,” he said. “That’s not a very specific word. I know what you mean by it but I think you’d best think it over a moment. Why do you think I’m not scary _to you_?”

The boy considered it. He was probably eleven, Geralt thought, and small; he wouldn’t have been selected for the Trial of the Grasses yet. It felt… odd, in his chest, to think of it that way, a kind of bad/good feeling he couldn’t quite square away. The sort of thing he knew it was dangerous to let out. But he couldn’t walk away from any of this, and he couldn’t take Jaskier and Ciri and leave. Not yet. He needed the wound in Jaskier’s thigh to begin to heal shut from the inside first, before he could risk it in the wilderness. They probably didn’t have time for that, but he needed it.

“Because,” the boy said hesitantly, then bit his lip as he thought it over. 

“Because you’re not a monster,” one of the girls said. “ _Obviously_.”

“She’s right,” Geralt said. 

“But Witchers don’t only kill monsters,” one of the older boys said. “They kill people sometimes too.”

“And people kill Witchers,” Geralt said, which he probably shouldn’t have said. “Like anyone, I’ll defend myself. But I don’t see you threatening me, so I feel no need to threaten you. So I don’t have to be scary, to you.”

“Unless we threaten you,” the first boy said.

“Well,” Geralt said, “yes, that would be how that works.”

“But you don’t look like you’d _ever_ be scary,” the first boy persisted.

“Errrr,” Ciri said. “He’s scary, believe me.”

“I’m not dressed like a Witcher,” Geralt said. “I lost my armor and most of my gear in the fall of Cintra. I don’t even have a silver sword at the moment. I really don’t look the part. But I promise, I really am a Witcher.”

“What does he do that’s scary?” the first boy demanded of Ciri.

“Er,” Ciri said, making a face. “He caught an arrow right out of the air, yesterday.”

The children all turned to look at him in unison. “Can you do that?” the older boy demanded.

“Yes,” Geralt said. 

The first boy had a look on his face like he’d been shown something he’d always wanted, and told he could have it. “Can we _test_ that?”

Geralt looked around at the children’s faces. “Don’t you have chores you need to be doing?”

“No,” the oldest boy said. Geralt looked at the girl who was spinning.

She caught his look and laughed. “He’s telling the truth,” she said, “we’re all allowed to play until midday.”

“Hm,” Geralt said. “Well, in that case, I suppose an experiment could be arranged.”

  
  


Jaskier was napping pleasantly in the main room of the big house, leg propped up just so, when he became aware that someone was sitting close to him. He opened his eyes and found Uretta, the matriarch of the family, sitting with her hands folded in her lap, leaning forward slightly. 

“Ah,” she said, “you’re awake.”

“I am now,” Jaskier said. “Is aught amiss?”

“Mm,” she said, “I don’t know. The children seem to be shooting your Witcher with arrows.”

“What,” Jaskier said, blinking hard. 

“The children,” she said. “It’s Sevenday morning, so they are allowed to go outside and play however they like, and I only set one of the older girls to watch them to make sure they don’t burn down a building, but I just glanced out and they’ve got a bow and some arrows and your Witcher seems to be defending himself with a broken shovel handle?”

“What,” Jaskier said again. Then, “Help me up, I have to--”

Between the two of them, they managed to get Jaskier to the door of the house. Sure enough, the central courtyard of the compound was full of shrieking children. A boy, approximately twelve, had a small bow and a bucket of arrows next to him. At the far end of the courtyard, Geralt was standing with a broken haft of wood, looking majestic and grim.

He wasn’t bloody, at all, which was something. And there were no adults present. Jaskier stood in the doorway a moment, leaning on Uretta with one arm and the door post with the other. “What the fuck,” he said quietly.

“I don’t know,” Uretta said. “These are my grands and great-grands and normally they’re reasonable children, but--”

“He’s not under any duress,” Jaskier said. 

Geralt cocked his head, listening in a posture Jaskier knew well-- listening behind him, was what that head tilt meant-- and then called out, “Clear!”

The boy pulled an arrow out of the bucket and nocked it smoothly. Jaskier noticed that while the arrow had fletching, it had no tip; it was just a shaft. “Huh,” Jaskier said, and then the boy loosed the arrow, and quicker than sight, Geralt batted it away with the broken shovel handle. 

The children cheered. “That’s six,” Ciri called out-- Ciri was there, standing among the crowd of boys. 

“There’s no tips,” Jaskier said. “They’re not really shooting him.”

“Even without a tip an arrow shaft would still go straight through your eye,” Uretta said, indignant. “Is he _playing_?”

“I think he is,” Jaskier said. 

“Clear,” Geralt called out again. The boy raised his bow again, nocking an arrow, and hesitated a moment, then loosed it. Geralt’s motion wasn’t even visible this time, perceptible only by the clattering of the arrow as it landed harmlessly somewhere off to the side, and then he slowly lowered the shovel handle. 

“Seven,” Ciri said. 

“What the _absolute bloody bollocks_ are you _doing_ ,” Jaskier said, projecting for maximum effect.

To his delight, Geralt looked _guilty_ for a split second, before the normal impassive mask came back. The children all froze. Geralt straightened, and said, “You shouldn’t be up and about.”

“You shouldn’t be encouraging children to _shoot arrows at people_ ,” Jaskier said.

Geralt gave him a dour look. “I’ve told them,” he said, “you can’t attempt this until you’ve passed the Trial of the Grasses, which would kill most of them.”

“He says this as if it’s a reasonable thing to say,” Jaskier said, ostensibly to Uretta but projecting so everyone would hear him.

“Don’t worry,” Geralt said, and a trace of bitterness curled his lip as he leaned on the shovel handle. “They can’t attempt the Trial of the Grasses anymore, since the pogrom. They’re not going to run off and become Witchers no matter how much fun I make it sound like, because it’s not possible anymore, because everyone who knows how to do it is dead.” Still leaning on the shovel handle, he turned to glance at the boy with the bow, and said, “Clear.”

The boy hesitated a moment, glancing over at Uretta, but then he looked back at Geralt with excited determination and grabbed an arrow shaft and shot it quickly at him, where he was still leaning on the shovel handle. Geralt stayed leaning on the shovel handle, not even looking, but in an instant he had his other hand up and was holding the arrow shaft in it, caught neatly about halfway down so that the blank tip was inches away from his torso.

“Daja,” Uretta said, horrified.

“He said it was all right!” the boy with the bow said, gesturing. 

“Eight,” Ciri put in.

“He’s not in charge!” Uretta said. 

“He’s a grown-up!” said the oldest girl, who was sitting on a bench near the door. “I wasn’t going to tell him no!”

“He’s _theoretically_ a grown-up,” Jaskier said. 

Geralt put the shovel handle up to his shoulder and strolled over to them, looking unhurried, arrow shaft dangling from his fingers. “Well,” he said to the children, “I think we’ve proven the point. We could move on, don’t you think? Is eight enough?”

The children let out a chorus that roughly seemed to be in the affirmative, and Geralt said, “Have we got more shovel handles? I could teach you sword forms. Ah, no, better-- get sticks, about so long,” and he held his hands perhaps six or eight inches apart, “maybe the thickness of my thumb or so, and we’ll learn basic knife forms. That’s going to be more useful.” Jaskier and Uretta exchanged glances, and Geralt gave them both a challenging look, mouth curved up a little and eyebrows raised. As the children variously reacted, some running off to look for sticks and some looking to Uretta with pleading eyes, Geralt added, “Girls too, everyone should know this.”

“I suppose he has a point,” Uretta said, and the remaining children all cheered and took off looking for sticks. She looked at Geralt. “I wouldn’t think you’d be so eager to entertain a pack of children.”

Geralt had the shovel handle across his shoulders, with his wrists hooked over it idly and the arrow shaft still between two of his fingers, as he surveyed the courtyard. “They’re good kids,” he said. “You’re lucky.”

Jaskier retreated back inside because standing, even well-dosed with painkillers, was torture, but Uretta and he sat in the main building’s kitchen and watched the courtyard as Geralt did various improbably athletic things with the children. It was good for Ciri, Jaskier thought, to get to be among others her age, and to learn with them. She’d probably been tutored solo for most of her childhood, and while that was fine, it didn’t teach certain useful social skills. 

“I suppose we’re not leaving today,” Jaskier said. He’d been dreading it. Any moment, Geralt would suddenly become too nervous and need to flee. He had no idea whether Ciri were being pursued-- probably? But who would look for her here? They were rather a distance from Cintra, and a distance even from Sodden. The fact that this settlement, small enough to be nameless but large enough to be noticed, had been able to keep itself so tidily indicated that the wrack of war was largely behind them now. 

The oldest girl had left off her spinning and was delightedly learning parries and attacks, paired with Geralt himself to be the example for the others since she was the tallest of the children. Geralt wasn’t smiling, but Jaskier knew his body language by now; he was enjoying himself. And Ciri was clearly delighted; her face was a mask of determination every time Jaskier caught a glimpse of it, but it was better than the frozen frightened expression she often had to wear. 

They had to get her somewhere safe. Jaskier wasn’t convinced he’d do well accompanying them to Geralt’s mysterious final destination, but at least he could go most of the way with them. Provided this stupid injury healed well enough, he wouldn’t have much trouble making his way to Oxenfurt from wherever they parted ways. 

He was just hoping Geralt could hold himself together in the face of all this socialization and not lose all reason and frantically push Jaskier away again. 

To be honest, that one night mostly just felt like a dream. He had no real belief that it would ever happen again, or anything like it. But Geralt had kissed his forehead, in the dark. That felt like a dream too. He couldn’t reconcile it with the relationship they’d had for twenty-two years now (he’d done the math, quietly, to himself), and he had no idea how they’d fit together now. 

“I don’t fancy your chances on the road with an open wound like you have,” Uretta said. “Nowhere to wash it clean? And the stress of riding, even if someone carries you-- you’d be breaking open any healing it’d get, as fast as it could happen. That’s the way to get an abscess and blood poisoning.”

“We can’t stay long, though,” Jaskier said fretfully. Geralt had said he wanted to leave him behind. “I’m not sure of the details but Geralt got himself in terrible trouble at Cintra and I’d hate to find that anyone was pursuing him.” It seemed as good a cover story as any. “Not like he’s told me much, but the state he was in when I caught up to him-- well.”

“I don’t know what he’s normally like,” Uretta said, “but I’d wager he’s in need of a rest as well. This is a fairly safe place, Jaskier, and we’re glad enough of his herb-work that we’ll not turf you out.” She waved a hand at the window, outside of which Geralt was standing and watching a pair of children apparently fighting to the death. “And it’s good for the children to have something else-- we can’t let them go play in the forest like they’re used to, not with so much trouble afoot, and they’ve been getting up to mischief in the meantime.”

“I think the deciding factor’s going to be my horse,” Jaskier said. “If she’s too badly injured to ride, then we’re stuck here.”

“Lashlo’s been caring for her,” Uretta said, “and he’s a good hand with horses, I’m sure she’ll be fine within a couple of days. He’s the only reason Igri and Gurun are still alive for your man to treat them, his skill with horse-healing; he’s the closest we’ve got to a healer until Tarilla can come around again.”

Igri and Gurun were the two household members who were sick. Igri was an old man with some sort of diet-related disease; Geralt had immediately identified what was wrong with him before he’d even looked at him, and Jaskier had realized that Geralt had done so by smell. He knew, now-- being in Geralt’s arms on the back of the horse, he’d finally been close enough to hear the intake of breath and identify that familiar body language as being the witcher scenting the air like an animal. He’d always done it, Jaskier had noticed it before, but he’d assumed the man was listening. 

Gurun was a youngish woman who had some kind of long-standing infection, and Geralt had sat in deep contemplation with her before finally mixing her something to dose her with. He had told her to take it slowly, a little at a time, over the course of several hours. Both patients had slept deeply overnight and woken this morning greatly refreshed. Some of it was that they were being properly treated at all, after days of only horse medicine, but Jaskier had an inkling that Geralt understood a great deal more of herbs than the area cunning-woman, and was likely to have better success with these patients than her, provided he didn’t kill them. Which he was clearly somewhat nervous about. 

He was nervous about everything. Maybe it was perspective, but Jaskier was realizing how much of Geralt’s prickliness was fear. Which was strange to consider, because if anyone was the epitome of physically fearless, it was surely Cut-Himself-Out-Of-The-Inside-Of-A-Selkimor Of Rivia. 

But Geralt _was_ afraid. Of other people, primarily. Being perfectly capable of defending himself wasn’t the easy solution it seemed like. There was a lot of past pain, there, and old terrors. But despite it all, despite his insistence that he wasn’t human, Geralt was a person, and he needed other people. Humans weren’t meant for solitary lives, and Witchers had all started out as humans. 

Uretta got up as the preparations for the midday meal intensified around them. One of the middling-aged women, mother of at least two of the children outside, stood at the window next to Jaskier for a few moments, watching in perplexity. “What is he doing?”

“I think he decided that teaching the children knife-fighting, using sticks, was the most productive way to spend a morning,” Jaskier said. 

“Oh, thank heavens,” the woman said, laughing, “I’d been wondering who was going to teach my sons to knife-fight. Oh, my daughter too, I see.”

“It’s a life skill,” Jaskier said. One that he did not possess. At the moment, Geralt was fending off attacks from no less than five gawky ten- or eleven-year-olds, using a stick so small that it barely extended half a fingerlength out of the grip of his palm. One of the children daringly jumped up onto his back and he caught the boy with one hand, holding him in position so the boy could pretend to stab him in the back of the neck. 

Howls audible even at this distance, Geralt pretended to stagger and collapse, and the children piled onto him, fake-stabbing him over and over with their sticks. After a moment he sat up, peeling various small bodies off himself one-handed and clearly trying to calm them down. He was laughing, hair wildly disheveled and dirt on his face. Ciri came and stood just outside the pile of children, hands on her hips, and he looked up to speak to her with his face all wide-open in amusement and fondness. 

“He knows children,” the woman said, shaking her head slightly. 

“I’d noticed that,” Jaskier said. “He was telling us yesterday about the school where he learned to be a Witcher. There must have been a lot of other children there.” He had a sick feeling that he knew what Geralt had meant by _the pogrom_ , just inferring it from that context. It was generally known that Witchers were dying out and no more were being made. 

“Not anymore,” the woman said, eyebrows drawing together in concern.

“No,” Jaskier said. “Not anymore.”

The children piled inside in a raucous collection as the midday meal was served, Geralt hanging back and beating dust off himself outside. Jaskier watched him shaking dirt out of his hair. Ciri came over and spoke to him, and he looked down at her, then reached over and adjusted her hat before patting her on the shoulder and then putting his hand between her shoulderblades to steer her into the house. 

“That child is a girl,” the woman said quietly.

Jaskier glanced up at her. “Yeah,” he said. “We figured it was safer to just… pretend, though.”

The woman nodded grimly, looking out the window. “We think of that sometimes,” she said. “I have a set of boy’s clothes for my daughter, always, in case soldiers come here. They may think it odd that we have only sons but we can always pretend to be a strange cult.”

“Good thinking,” Jaskier said. 

She glanced at him, then, and smiled tightly. “We live in a hard world,” she said. “We are safe here, for now, but.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, and thought about a song. No, a poem; it was too sad for a song.

Geralt quietly cleaned his battered knuckles and anointed them with the antisceptic salve he’d made, sealing up the nicks and scrapes and cuts the children had left on him. He’d really let them beat the heck out of him, because it was fun. The next adult who wanted to play rough with them was probably going to suffer for it, but that wasn’t Geralt’s problem.

He was feeling uneasy again. Something was wrong, or maybe he was just uncomfortable because this was much closer quarters than he normally lived in. 

Something thumped in the hall and he sat perfectly still, listening. A regular thumping… a crutch, he figured out, just before the door creaked open and Jaskier came in, walking with a sensible sturdy crutch so he could keep his weight off his bad leg. “There you are,” Jaskier said. 

Geralt didn’t answer, since it didn’t need an answer. Jaskier came in and eased himself down onto the bed, hanging the crutch off the post of the headboard. “Licking your wounds?” Jaskier asked.

Geralt nodded. Jasier laughed. “Those kids-- you really let them go to town on you!” 

“Best way to learn,” Geralt said. He felt around under his hair until he found the scrape the one kid had left when he’d ‘killed’ Geralt. He’d drawn blood, with the end of his stick. Geralt dabbed a bit more of the salve onto it, just to get it to heal a little faster. Then he felt across his face. He’d taken a few blows to the face, but none seemed to be bleeding, so he dabbed a fingerful of salve onto the blisters the _Axii_ had left inside his lip, instead, mostly just to get the oil off his hand.

“They split your lip?” Jaskier asked.

Geralt shook his head. “No,” he said, “it’s from holding the sign in my teeth when I was dealing with your horse. Turns out signs don’t belong in your mouth, which I knew but I don’t know how else I was supposed to get a hand free.”

“Tsk,” Jaskier said, “let me look--”

“Stay there,” Geralt said. “It’s fine, it’s mostly healed by now.” He put the lid back on the jar of salve and turned to look at the bard, who was half-sprawled across the bed, smelling mostly good and not particularly of pain. He’d clearly started to roll up to come take a look at Geralt’s blistered lip, but he’d subsided, so he was lolling in relaxation at the moment. 

He looked… inviting, actually. Geralt considered a moment, then went and checked to make sure the door was latched. It was, so he turned and looked at Jaskier. No, he shouldn’t; he composed himself and went over to sit on the edge of the bed, bent over Jaskier’s leg and and inhaled deeply to see if he caught any scent of infection.

Jaskier raised his eyebrows and tilted his head back a little. “Do I smell good?” he asked.

“No infection,” Geralt said. A little prickle of… arousal? Hm. 

“You said you smell me all the time,” Jaskier said. “Including what mood I’m in.”

“I can smell when you’re turned-on,” Geralt said, figuring he’d just get it over with.

The scent intensified. “Really,” Jaskier said, cheeks turning slightly pink.

“Yes,” Geralt said. “I’ve always been able to. You have fewer secrets than you thought.”

“So you’ve known,” Jaskier said, “the whole time--”

“A lot of people get that scent when they look at me,” Geralt said. “It’s also usually more laced with fear than yours, though.”

He was pinker now, but his eyes were sparkling a little too. “Really,” he said.

“I mean,” Geralt said, “humans get turned on about scary things all the time.”

“I guess you’d know,” Jaskier said. He mock-pouted. “The whole time, you knew I was--”

“I wasn’t going to encourage you,” Geralt said. “You have basically no fear response and it’s not healthy.”

“I’m afraid all the time,” Jaskier said, waving a hand. “Oh, that’s embarrassing. So the entire time I’ve known you, you’ve been perfectly aware that I was completely addled with lust--”

“Not quite the entire time,” Geralt pointed out. “Only every so often.”

“No, it was the entire time,” Jaskier said.

Geralt sighed. “I don’t know what you’re _feeling_ ,” he clarified, “I just know what you’re feeling strongly enough to have a physical response about.”

“Oh,” Jaskier said. “Oh _ho_. Well, I mean, even at eighteen, I couldn’t have _a physical response_ every moment of every day.”

“Not like _that_ ,” Geralt said, and his own cheeks felt hot. “I mean, like, enough to change your body temperature, things like that.”

“I don’t know if you realize this,” Jaskier said, “but most humans can’t even tell if their _own_ body temperature is changed, let alone that of someone else.”

“I do realize,” Geralt said, “I just figured that you can’t run screaming just now so I can be as creepy as I like.”

Jaskier laughed, delighted. “You can!” he said. “I can’t! That’s fantastic. What other horrifying and unnerving truths do you want to reveal?”

“You already know most of them,” Geralt said. 

“And you know all my secrets,” Jaskier said. “Including that I’m not turned on by you because you’re scary, because I’m not scared of you.”

“Most of the time,” Geralt said. “You’ve been scared of me a time or two.”

“I’d be an idiot not to be,” Jaskier said. “I mean, not that I’m not an idiot.”

“But I don’t know all of your secrets,” Geralt said. “Just the ones about your body.” Jaskier was looking up at him with a soft smile of fond amusement, and tilted his chin up slightly, invitingly. Geralt had been trying to resist it, but that was too much. He leaned down and put his nose against the pulse point there, under the hinge of Jaskier’s lovely sharp jaw. “Don’t think I’m not aware of how ridiculous it is that I knew you twenty-two years without ever knowing your real name.”

“Don’t,” Jaskier said sharply, and Geralt pulled back in some surprise. “Use that name,” Jaskier went on, regarding him seriously. His eyes were very blue, which of course Geralt had noticed before, but in this dimly-lit bedroom they were more so than usual somehow. “I only wrote it down because she said for posterity, and I thought-- but-- I don’t-- use it, in person.” He shook his head very slightly. “If it was important you’d know it already.”

That seemed like more honesty than Geralt had meant to sign up for, but it needed a response, so he said, “Well. I’m not from Rivia. So that’s why I didn’t write that in my signature.”

“You’re not,” Jaskier said, boggling, and then he laughed and Geralt couldn’t help but laugh as well.

“I had to pick a name,” Geralt said. “I came up with a surname and M-- my teacher, he laughed at me and said to pick something simpler. So I chose Rivia because it sounded nice. I’d never been there.”

“It’s not really very nice,” Jaskier pointed out.

“It isn’t,” Geralt said. “But it stuck, so there it is.” Jaskier smelled really good, and his heart was beating fast and his mouth was watering a little. So Geralt kissed him then, soft and exploratory. He was freshly-shaven and soft, but it wasn’t like kissing a woman. It wasn’t like kissing anybody else. 

The children were all gathered together learning reading and writing, Geralt knew, safe in the kitchen, and Ciri had been given one of the advanced lesson pages the older kids shared, and was accepting with decently good grace that while she already knew all of it, it didn’t hurt to see what other kids her age were supposed to be learning. She seemed to think she’d have to do a lot of pretending to be a commoner, and it was just as well for her to learn how to do that. 

So he figured he had probably an hour here, to do whatever it was he wanted. Although… “I’m probably still poisonous,” he said. 

“You seem so much better,” Jaskier said. 

“I am,” Geralt said, “but that just means I’m down to levels _I_ can stand, not that _you_ can.”

“Fair,” Jaskier said, chewing his lip a little in a familiar gesture that had always, just a little, given Geralt the urge to take over the biting, so he leaned in and did, pulling Jaskier’s lip between his and setting his teeth in it gently. Jaskier made a funny little noise and writhed, sucking in his breath. “Fuck,” he said, when Geralt released him.

“Mm,” Geralt said. “I’d love to but it might kill you, so.”

“Do you say that to all the ladies?” Jaskier asked, batting his eyelashes and laughing.

“No,” Geralt said. “If you pay them they don’t care if you talk. Also they generally take requests and don’t ask questions.”

“Surely,” Jaskier said, “some of them are volunteers.”

“Not usually,” Geralt said, and then kissed him again because he didn’t want to talk that much. He did feel there was one detail worth adding, however. “Also it’s usually far too risky to try it with men.”

“Oh, don’t I know _that_ ,” Jaskier said. “They’re all about it but then after they’ve gotten off they’re ashamed of it and blame you for making them do it.”

Geralt raised his eyebrows. “Exactly,” he said.

“Who knew we’d have that in common,” Jaskier said. 

“I mean, women do that too,” Geralt said, “but that’s because I’m a freak, so--”

“They do a bit with me too, to be fair,” Jaskier said. “Musicians aren’t exactly respect--”

“Enough talking,” Geralt decided, and gently but firmly pressed Jaskier down into the bed and unfastened his trousers.

He kept an ear out for movement elsewhere in the house, for anyone coming to find them or any sign of upheaval, but even so still felt that he couldn’t get too involved in anything here. So he settled for sucking Jaskier’s cock, as it was something he hadn’t done in a long time and it smelled so good. It was worth it, even with the blisters on his lip.

Jaskier managed to be fervently appreciative and politely considerate at the same time, though some of it was undoubtedly that with his leg injured he mostly had no choice but to lie politely still. He made quiet, choked-off, appreciative noises, though, and curled his fingers with a lovely gentleness to cradle the back of Geralt’s head.

Geralt glanced up at him, enjoying his awestruck expression. His eyes rolled back and he made a choked little noise, and Geralt hummed encouragingly. With a soft punched-out exhalation, Jaskier came for him, and Geralt let himself make a low satisfied growling noise as he pulled off.

“Let me,” Jaskier said dazedly, reaching for him. Geralt sat on the bed, resting his back against the wall, and shook his head.

“No,” he said, “but you can watch.”

“Hnngh,” Jaskier said, gingerly shoving himself up on an elbow for a better view. It wasn’t quite non-verbal, but then, Geralt hadn’t really given him the full treatment. 

“I think my goal is achievable,” Geralt said, licking his hand and setting to work on himself. “That was possibly the longest you’ve gone without speaking since I’ve known you.”

“Rude,” Jaskier said, “and inaccurate, I sleep sometimes.”

“You talk in your sleep,” Geralt said. 

“I do _not,_ ” Jaskier said, but interrupted himself. “Look at _you_.” 

“Yeah,” Geralt said roughly. He wasn’t going to need long. It had been decades since he’d sucked a cock and it wasn’t something he’d thought he missed until he was confronted with the possibility of doing it, and now his entire hindbrain was full of that fantastic sensation of the heaviness on his tongue and the salt-bitter taste and _oh_ , when they got somewhere with privacy and a door that locked and somewhere safe to stash the kid and no toxic buildup in Geralt’s body he was absolutely going to _pound_ the _everloving_ \--

“Oh _fuck_ ,” Jaskier said fervently, “that’s--”

“Nngh,” Geralt said, shuddering as he finished. Oh, that was a good one, and Jaskier was watching with his mouth slightly open, avid and absent at the same time. Geralt leaned over and caught his jaw with the hand that didn’t have possibly-toxic stuff all over it, and kissed him, sweet and fervent. 

“That’s _blue_ ,” Jaskier said. 

Geralt wiped his hand off on a rag, careful to bundle it up; he’d have to burn it later, somewhere that nobody’d breathe the smoke. “Did you think I was lying?”

“I mean, no, but,” Jaskier said. “That was-- noticeably alarming.”

“When I told you I’d nearly poisoned myself to death I wasn’t kidding,” Geralt said. “There’s one in particular that is expressly designed to make my blood become poisonous if a thing’s trying to eat me, and it turns out it doesn’t _really_ work on mornats but I tried it three times anyway because it slows them down a little and I needed whatever I could get.”

“Wow,” Jaskier said.

“I was pretty desperate,” Geralt admitted. “But I’d’ve died in another hour or so.”

“You’d’ve died anyway if Yennefer hadn’t showed up,” Jaskier said, and got that slightly bitter wry look on his face he always got when Yennefer appeared or was so much as mentioned. 

Geralt slid over in the bed and took Jaskier’s face between his hands to kiss him, which worked marvellously at making that expression go away. There wasn’t really an answer for that, not really. Or maybe there was.

“Do you know why Yennefer left so abruptly, after the dragon hunt?” he murmured, once he had Jaskier soft and pliant and boneless beneath him. 

Jaskier’s shoulder muscles went a bit tense, but he gave up after just an instant and looked tiredly up at Geralt. “No,” he said. “I don’t know why _anything_ about that _entire experience_ happened.”

“That’s why I’m going to tell you,” Geralt said wearily, and Jaskier had the decency to look abashed. 

“Oh.” He raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure you’re ready to talk about it?”

“No,” Geralt said, and rolled off to lie next to him, but he didn’t go far. The bed wasn’t that big. “But while I have you incapacitated so you can’t run screaming, this is the time to tell you about what an idiot I am.”

“Hm,” Jaskier said, but his expression was kind and a little worried, and he reached over and ran his thumb just under Geralt’s lower lip, looking concerned. 

Geralt licked blood away from where he’d torn one of his _Axii_ -inflicted blisters, dismissing it. “The djinn,” he said. 

“Ooh,” Jaskier said, pulling a grimace. “That was a nasty business.”

“I had the wishes all along but by the time I really realized, there was just the one wish left,” Geralt went on. “And I didn’t want Yennefer to be killed, and I knew the djinn would kill her, so I decided to use my wish to stop that from happening.”

“I wondered what you wished for,” Jaskier said.

“Well, I didn’t,” Geralt hesitated. “I didn’t think the wording through entirely. What I actually managed to do was tie her destiny and mine together.”

“Hm,” Jaskier said, brows furrowing. “So, um--”

“Well,” Geralt said. “She finally figured out the entire foundation of our relationship was this djinn wish and not…”

“Did you wish for her to fuck you?” Jaskier asked.

“No, but,” Geralt said. “I mean, she’s not wrong. The way I’ve acted with her from then on doesn’t really, er, make sense, when you compare it to how I usually act.” He was uncomfortable but he had to finish. “So it’s-- I mean, it’s not natural, we’re not just two people who get along. Whatever the djinn did, it’s both of us.”

Jaskier’s eyebrows went up. “So you’re saying you don’t have any natural feelings toward her, nor she toward you?”

“I’m not saying _that_ ,” Geralt said, aware that perhaps this was the wrong tack to have taken with someone who seemed to consider himself a rival with Yennefer. “But,” he went on, still more uncomfortable.

“But she is,” Jaskier said. “She thinks there’s nothing genuine, and what’s more, she’s angry at you for the whole thing.”

“Well,” Geralt said. “Right.”

“But you didn’t mean to do it,” Jaskier concluded reasonably.

“I didn’t,” Geralt said. “I really didn’t.”

Jaskier contemplated that, and put his fingers against the side of Geralt’s face. It made him twitchy, being considered so closely, but he submitted to it. It felt like Jaskier was trying to memorize his face, tracing his thumb along the edge of a cheekbone, an eyebrow. After a moment, Jaskier sighed. “It is precisely like sitting through a highly dramatic moment at a banquet all caused by an invocation of the Law of Surprise and then immediately afterward invoking the Law of Surprise on one of the participants and then being stunned when it instantly has an outcome you didn’t forsee, despite the entire thing being expressly designed to surprise you.”

“I was on the spot,” Geralt said, feeling harried. “I don’t know!”

“Shh,” Jaskier said, laughing softly, and leaned in and kissed Geralt’s nose. “The balladeers have already decided, it was Destiny moved your tongue.”

“There’s not a ballad,” Geralt said, with a distinct sinking feeling.

“There’s not one _yet_ ,” Jaskier said. “One must know the ending before one can write the beginning.”

“Hm,” Geralt said dubiously, but instead of objecting more strenuously he just closed his eyes and let Jaskier’s hand trace warm lines along the edges of his face. 


End file.
